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It is also possible that Father Zimmermann caused you to stop matriculating for the reason perhaps that your convent lacks funds to pay the tuition. I frankly hope this is the case, not only because it relieves my mind, but in a practical sense. If this is indeed the case, you have only to say the word and I will offer my services gratis for an indefinite period of time. Can we discuss this matter further? May I ask again when your visiting days at the convent are? May I be free to plan to visit you at the convent next Saturday afternoon, July 6, between 3 and 5 o’clock in the afternoon, dependent upon the schedule of trains between Montreal and Toronto? I await your reply with great anxiety.
With respect and admiration,
Sincerely yours,
(signed)
Jean De Daumier-Smith
Staff Instructor
Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres
P.S. In my last letter I casually asked if the young lady in the blue outfit in the foreground of your religious picture was Mary Magdalene, the sinner. If you have not as yet replied to my letter, please go on refraining. It is possible that I was mistaken and I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am willing to stay in the dark.
Even today, as late as now, I have a tendency to wince when I remember that I brought a dinner suit up to Les Amis with me. But bring one I did, and after I’d finished my letter to Sister Irma, I put it on. The whole affair seemed to call out for my getting drunk, and since I had never in my life been drunk (for fear that excessive drinking would shake the hand that painted the pictures that copped the three first prizes, etc.), I felt compelled to dress for the tragic occasion.
While the Yoshotos were still in the kitchen, I slipped downstairs and telephoned the Windsor Hotel—which Bobby’s friend, Mrs. X, had recommended to me before I’d left New York. I reserved a table for one, for eight o’clock.
Around seven-thirty, dressed and slicked up, I stuck my head outside my door to see if either of the Yoshotos were on the prowl. I didn’t want them to see me in my dinner jacket, for some reason. They weren’t in sight, and I hurried down to the street and began to look for a cab. My letter to Sister Irma was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I intended to read it over at dinner, preferably by candlelight.
I walked block after block without so much as seeing a cab at all, let alone an empty one. It was rough going. The Verdun section of Montreal was in no sense a dressy neighborhood, and I was convinced that every passer-by was giving me a second, basically censorious look. When, finally, I came to the lunch bar where I’d bolted the “Coney Island Red-Hots” on Monday, I decided to let my reservation at the Hotel Windsor go by the board. I went into the lunch bar, sat down in an end booth, and kept my left hand over my black tie while I ordered soup, rolls and black coffee. I hoped that the other patrons would think I was a waiter on his way to work.
While I was on my second cup of coffee, I took out my unmailed letter to Sister Irma and reread it. The substance of it seemed to me a trifle thin, and I decided to hurry back to Les Amis and touch it up a bit. I also thought over my plans to visit Sister Irma, and wondered if it might not be a good idea to pick up my train reservations later that same evening. With those two thoughts in mind—neither of which really gave me the sort of lift I needed—I left the lunch bar and walked rapidly back to school.
Something extremely out of the way happened to me some fifteen minutes later. A statement, I’m aware, that has all the unpleasant earmarks of a build-up, but quite the contrary is true. I’m about to touch on an extraordinary experience, one that still strikes me as having been quite transcendent, and I’d like, if possible, to avoid seeming to pass it off as a case, or even a borderline case, of genuine mysticism. (To do otherwise, I feel, would be tantamount to implying or stating that the difference in spiritual sorties between St. Francis and the average, highstrung, Sunday leper-kisser is only a vertical one.)
In the nine o’clock twilight, as I approached the school building from across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic appliances shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress. She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right “profile” was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw, that she was being watched. I quickly smiled—to show her that this was a nonhostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass—but it did no good. The girl’s confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins—and her feet went out from under her. I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a skater. She immediately got to her feet without looking at me. Her face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand, and resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened—I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance. The thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers.
I backed away from the window and walked around the block twice, till my knees stopped buckling. Then, without daring to venture another look into the shop window, I went upstairs to my room and lay down on my bed. Some minutes, or hours later, I made, in French, the following brief entry in my diary: “I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everybody is a nun.” (Tout le monde est une nonne. )
Before going to bed for the night, I wrote letters to my four just-expelled students, reinstating them. I said a mistake had been made in the administration department. Actually, the letters seemed to write themselves. It may have had something to do with the fact that, before sitting down to write, I’d brought a chair up from downstairs.
It seems altogether anticlimactic to mention it, but Les Amis Des Vieux Maîtres closed down less than a week later, for being improperly licensed (for not being licensed at all, as a matter of fact). I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.
Right or wrong, I never again got in touch with Sister Irma.
Occasionally, I still hear from Bambi Kramer, though. The last I heard, she’d branched over into designing her own Christmas cards. They’ll be something to see, if she hasn’t lost her touch.
* * *
Teddy
* * *
“I’ll exquisite day you, buddy, if you don’t get down off that bag this minute. And I mean it,” Mr. McArdle said. He was speaking from the inside twin bed—the bed farther away from the porthole. Viciously, with more of a whimper than a sigh, he foot-pushed his top sheet clear of his ankles, as though any kind of coverlet was suddenly too much for his sunburned, debilitated-looking body to bear. He was lying supine, in just the trousers of his pajamas, a lighted cigarette in his right hand. His head was propped up just enough to rest uncomfortably, almost masochistically, against the very base of the headboard. His pillow and ashtray were both on the floor, between his and Mrs. McArdle’s bed. Without raising his body, he reached out a nude, inflamed-pink, right arm and flicked his ashes in the general direction of the night table. “October, for God’s sake,” he said. “If this is October weather, gimme August.” He turned his head to the right again, toward Teddy, looking for trouble. “C’mon,” he said. “What the hell do you think I’m talking for? My health? Get down off there, please.”
Teddy was standing on the broadside of a new looking cowhide Gladstone, the better to see out of his parents’ open porthole. He was wearing extremely dirty, white ankle-sneakers, no socks, seersucker shorts that were both too long for him and at least a size too large in the seat, an overly laundered T shirt that had a hole the size of a dime in the right shoulder, and an incongruously handsome, black alligator belt. He needed a haircut—especially at the nape of the neck—the worst way, as only a small boy with an almost full-grown head and a reedlike neck can need one.
“Teddy, did you hear me?”
Teddy was not leaning out of the porthole quite so far or so precariously as s
mall boys are apt to lean out of open portholes—both his feet, in fact, were flat on the surface of the Gladstone—but neither was he just conservatively well-tipped; his face was considerably more outside than inside the cabin. Nonetheless, he was well within hearing of his father’s voice—his father’s voice, that is, most singularly. Mr. McArdle played leading roles on no fewer than three daytime radio serials when he was in New York, and he had what might be called a third-class leading man’s speaking voice: narcissistically deep and resonant, functionally prepared at a moment’s notice to outmale anyone in the same room with it, if necessary even a small boy. When it was on vacation from its professional chores, it fell, as a rule, alternately in love with sheer volume and a theatrical brand of quietness-steadiness. Right now, volume was in order.
“Teddy. God damn it—did you hear me?”
Teddy turned around at the waist, without changing the vigilant position of his feet on the Gladstone, and gave his father a look of inquiry, whole and pure. His eyes, which were pale brown in color, and not at all large, were slightly crossed—the left eye more than the right. They were not crossed enough to be disfiguring, or even to be necessarily noticeable at first glance. They were crossed just enough to be mentioned, and only in context with the fact that one might have thought long and seriously before wishing them straighter, or deeper, or browner, or wider set. His face, just as it was, carried the impact, however oblique and slow-travelling, of real beauty.
