Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher
perfect. He lured her, and in what was almost a kindly way he interested her. Papa Jean, she thought mockingly, dear old puzzled family man, kindly clown Papa Jean . . .
He was talking about Léonie. She smiled trustingly at him, and nodded and frowned, and although so much of her was not there, a great deal was. What she heard she tucked away, just as she would unconsciously have remembered the details of a dull novel or a hackneyed play.
“Of course Léonie is a few years older than Paul,” he was saying heavily, painfully, as if he were reading from a letter he himself had written after much thought, but had never meant to make public. “That may perhaps explain her—her troubles. Paul has always been a happier kind of person, very insouciant and teasing and thoughtless. And then there is the question of religion. Her mother is believing and very devout. I myself, I must confess to you, am agnostic, and have always been so. But Madame Jeannetôt—as I say, she is devout. Indeed, at certain times . . .”
Jennie knew that he was telling her that the Church was a part of their marital pleasures, and that the Cross was a sword between them on the bed, and that when his wife was full of monthly pain she knelt more easily than ever to confess her sins. The lines were written: the puppet was jerking neatly on cue. She sighed in sympathy, without looking at him. He would go on.
“Yes,” he said, “Léonie was raised according to her dear mother’s wishes, and I cannot help feeling, although of course I have no right to say so, that it might have been better for her to have left the convent a little sooner. Léonie has never been beautiful—”
“Oh,” Jennie said in soft protest, “anything young and fresh is beautiful.”
Jeannetôt looked at her instead of going on, and for a second annoyed her by stepping out of his part. He should have reminded her that his daughter was not young. Instead he looked at her. She was soon reassured, for she knew that he would say the alternate line, the other possible one.
“Yes, that is true,” he said, and he looked on at her heavily, with courteous sincerity. You are very beautiful, he was saying.
Jennie smiled at him, a little withdrawn to remind him that they were, theoretically at least, strangers, and then she said, “But Léonie? Is she not beautiful?”
“No. No, I regret to admit. When she was about eighteen, that is when she should have left the Sisters. But now she is past twenty-five, past the age.”
“The age?”
“That is, she is not interesting to the young men we can introduce her to, men in my office, friends of Paul’s. They all find her too serious. She has let herself grow sallow, and she seldom goes to the beauty salons for her hair, her nails. Instead”—and in his voice was an impotent curse—“she goes down to St. Jacques and falls on her knees and sucks in the incense. Then she comes home, locks her door, weeps.”
He looked at his hands and wiped them carefully with his handkerchief. He was leaning forward slackly, swaying with the train, like an old clown. “Children are sometimes very disturbing,” he said.
Jennie thought, Oh no! No, he can’t be going to say those lines too! She felt a little hysterical, as if she might laugh in his face. If he told her that they were still worth all the suffering they caused their parents, she would. She shrugged a little and let her eyes fall away from his grayish face.
“I have never been a mother,” she murmured as softly as she could against the noise of the train. Then, before he could say, “Ah, Madame, there is no joy to compare with that of motherhood!” she asked eagerly, “But Léonie with the Little Thing? What is the situation there?”
He did not answer, but smiled grudgingly, as if he were remembering things he should not smile to remember.
“I am indiscreet,” Jennie said. “I ask impertinent questions.”
“Not at all. My God, I have never met such a magically intuitive, sensitive confidante in my life, Madame! My own indiscretion astounds me. How could I, how dared I, thus unburden myself to you, a complete stranger?”
“But I do not feel like one.”
“No. No, you are not. You are a part of this whole exquisite day, so full of rebirth . . .” He looked at the rich land flashing by. “We are almost at Dijon. When the train stops, will you be charitable enough to join me at lunch? We are two cars away from the restaurant. It is easier to walk then.”
His knuckles were white, Jennie saw. She did not want to eat with him. She wanted to be alone, to look unhindered at the lusty or mincing or suspicious or jolly manners of the people all about her. She wanted to be silent, to be alone and enjoying it, not pitted against the world, as she drank the crude apéritif, ate the crude hors-d’oeuvres and then the simple crude fresh food on its great trays held skillfully over and around her as the train hurtled through Burgundy. She loved eating alone on trains. She looked again at Jeannetôt’s tired burgher-master face and then at his hands, which he surely did not know were thus tightly, whitely clenched before her. She smiled and said she would be very glad to join him at his table, and it was not until she was smoothing her hair in the gritty water closet that she realized that this was the first time in her life she had ever accepted such an invitation from a stranger, an ordinary picked-up traveling man on a train.
She grinned at herself in the jumpy mirror. Freedom had gone to her head for fair! She would be as careful as a nun at a carnival, would Jennie!
IT WAS A pleasant meal. They sat opposite two other human beings whose age and sex Jennie could not have told a half-hour later, two courteous zeros who bowed as she sat down, wiped their silver on their napkins, and bowed as they left. Jeannetôt was more entertaining than she had expected, and they discussed with liveliness the strange subject of the scarcity of graveyard space in Switzerland. He, as an electrical engineer, thought not only that the state should forbid any burial except by cremation, but that it should build a series of federal furnaces. He had worked out a system that would, within a few burnings, start generating enough electricity in a cumulative pile to out-do any fast-running river, enough after, say, ten funerals to light a whole city for ten hours. Jennie was amused by him and pleased by the way his lumpish face lightened as he talked and by the complete lack of ghoulishness in his scientific interest in cadavers. She decided he was worth talking to, listening to.
He asked her permission to order a large bottle of the best red Bordeaux on the list, and they lifted their glasses solemnly to Burgundy as they slipped from the station in Dijon. Bordeaux traveled better, they agreed. They both liked Burgundies better, they added without haste. They would not drink them every day, they said comfortably, but for festivals and holidays and the high flavors of such feastings, what was better? This was good too, they said, touching glasses; for a railroad claret it was not bad at all.
When the bills were being made out Jennie said, “Mine is separate, please.” Jeannetôt frowned politely. She smiled at him. “You are the first man I have ever permitted to dine with me in a train,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed your wine so much. I thank you for it. But it’s a matter of principle with me to pay for my own meal.”
He smiled back at her, with a little bow, and she knew that she had moved wisely. It was not that she would have hesitated to move any other way that pleased her: it was that by now she liked this man and was interested in making him enjoy her. The fact itself interested her. Certainly he was the dull solid businessman he had first seemed to be, and yet by now the warmth of his eyes and the astonishing latent gaiety in his face were biting at her consciousness of him.
Back in the compartment they sat across from each other as before, but between them and the two other people who had got on at Dijon (or were they the zeros from the dining table?) there was a wall built of sudden compatibility. They sipped a little brandy, she straight from her flask and he from a tiny silver drinking cup he produced gleefully from his pocket. They said almost nothing. Then Jennie put her head back against the stiff crocheted tidy with PLM on it and closed her eyes. She knew that Jeannetôt would