Michael J. Arlen - Exiles

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Contents

He used to joke about being frail and weak, about having had TB as a boy, and then something wrong with his back, and then a car accident (he had been walking across a street) in Los Angelesbut he so clearly didnt really think himself frail or weak, and when things started going wrong for him, going wrong in him I guess was more like it, he couldnt countenance it at all. The pain, yes, or things like that. Discomfort is what they call it. He could manage that all very damned well. But not the fact of things truly starting to go wrong.

It happened in the spring, I think. I remember the time vaguely, April. It must have been spring, but I was in the Army then and not paying much attention to seasons. Fort Dix. White board barracks. All that dust, and boots beside the bed, and those baggy dusty fatigues. A weird soft life, soft amid the weapons, the rifles, the machinery, the sounds of tank battalions and howitzers on the distant ranges. It was a telegramone of those long telegrams with some of the key words hashed up by the local teletypist. They called me out of formation one morning, into the orderly roomthe soft-faced, big-bellied, indoors sergeants sitting around at their desks having coffee. Some corporal handed me this thing, and I opened it and read it standing there. It seemed to read so easily, I read it right through. YOUR FATHER GOING INTO HOSPITAL TODAY SUSPECTED CANCER EXCELLENT DOCTOR CHANCES ARE GOOD WILL KEEP YOU ADVISED . And in a strange way I believed it, believed anyway the calm codelike positivism of the message. Suspected Excellent Chances are good Will keep you advised. My mother had a way with telegrams. It was one of the sergeants who snapped me out of it. What is it, kid? Your girl got pregnant? No, I said, my fathers going into the hospital for an operation; and then I told him some more, and then they all started wheeling into line, stirring things up, papers, forms, one of the roundest and most dough-faced of the sergeants tap-tap-tapping out an emergency pass on a tiny typewriter in the corner. It was very nice, one of those acts of complicity. I couldnt quite understand it at the time and felt apart from themthese strangers who were evidently expressing their own fears and worries. I was too cool for that sort of thing. I could take an emergency three-day-pass or leave it alone. But then I got into New York, and we were suddenly there, inside, in one of those blank, beige, tiled, airless hospital corridors, my mother and I, and I could understand quite a bit.

We walked up and down, walked up and down, and sat. My mother smoked. I told her about Fort Dix. Nurses passed, and all the doctors in the world. Finally, Doctor Gregson appearedthat was his name, Gregson. An excellent surgeon. One of the great surgeons. One of the really great, the very best. He was carrying a trim blue canvas case that unmistakably contained a tennis racket, and was buttoning up his jacket. He had just come from changing and was obviously in a hurry. I think we got it all, he said to my mother. It had spread quite far into the lymph. We had to take out a lung A few more sentences like that, and off he went. My father was never the same after Gregson, which is unfair to Gregson, since he doubtless would have died sooner, and probably worse, without him. Maybe if I hadnt met Gregson just then, and just that way, that busy on-my-way-to-the-River-Club look, that bloody tennis racket, like a figure out of some second-rate country-house comedy, I wouldnt still have such a particular sense of that moment in time, of an act ending that afternoon in the hospital. But its true, he wasnt the same afterwards. There was something crucial gone from him, and not just the lung either, although that certainly didnt help; and neither did the information we received later that the removal of the lung had been more in the nature of a hunch than a step that had been absolutely necessary.

It was so terrible really. He knew the lung was gone, and hated that, one more infirmity, and tried to make jokes about it although the jokes wouldnt take. But he didnt really believe about the rest. He would just lie in bed, at first in bed at the hospital, and then in bed at home, and then sitting up at home, and wait for something to happen to him, something to come back to him. In appearance, it wasnt quite all that passive, and much of the time he seemed fine. He had the wit and the irony and the strength or whatever it is that enables some people not only to survive bad things but somehow to move with grace above themhe could do that part of it very well, and down to the moment he died, about one year later, he managed to be himself, to be elegant, to be amusing, to be even gay. But there was something gone, and he was then only sixty, only sixty, whatever that means, and sometimes a look would cross his face, and linger there for a second, and surprise even him, I think, with its weight and bitterness.

In Paris, I remember, about six months later, we met, the three of us, a ghastly meeting really, the weather gray and sour and full of wet, which sometimes doesnt matter too much but then it seemed as if the whole earth, all the grass and trees and leaves and everything bright and sunlit had disappeared, was disappearing, and for good and all. Id gone over to Germany in the Army, and my mother and father had recently gone back to Europe on one of those trips that are supposed to give sick people a health-instilling change of air or sceneI dont know why hanging around hotels is supposed to be good for people who are feeling lousy, but it seems to be something that people who feel lousy find hard to resist. Anyway there they were, two weeks at the bright and tacky Dorchester in London, and then to the Lotti in Paris. I cant imagine why the Lotti, with its hush, and tiny shipboard corridors, and half-dead old ladies in the lobbyI think they probably felt that the gap between the way they were really feeling and the way the Ritz would expect, or would remind, them to feel would be too great. I came to see them there one weekend. They were in one of those small-windowed, thick-carpeted old rooms with lots of gilt and low-watt lightbulbs. The breakfast tray on the bed. A pile of books on a chair. Detective stories. The Devils of Loudun. The picture my mother always traveled with (a small blue watercolor of a Mediterranean scene, an island) on the bedside table. The curtains drawn. They both were very quiet.

My mothers sister was then in Paris, and so was one of my mothers few old close friends, Louise FerandeMadame Ferande, who did something at one of the couture houses, a tiny bony woman with one of those sharp, animated, uninterested faces. That first evening we all had drinks together, the five of us perched around a table in the tiny Lotti bar, my aunt talking at length about her hardships, which was okay, since she led, more or less by intent, a life so full of human drama and collision that, like a racing-car driver, she seemed to exist most naturally midpoint between some past near-miss and some awaited one. Right then she was having trouble with her lawyer, who was trying to cheat her, so she said. We talked about that for a while. My father didnt talk much at all. These women could be such bitches really, and then when he had left the bar for a moment they all crowded over the table and cooed and trilled about how marvelous he was, in such good shape, so elegant, not thin at all, well maybe a few pounds, but not thin, such good color. He was nearly dead by then, I think my mother knew that. I think he was beginning to know that. And then the next day it almost happened. In the morning, at dawn, he had some sort of seizure, something to do with the heart, the heart maybe working too hard because of there being only one lung. I dont know, it doesnt matter. But off he was taken suddenly, a now-strange city, a strange hotel, a strange doctor, a strange hospital, some small place out near Neuilly. He was okay, they said out there. The doctor was okay too. Nice. Sympathetic. But christ how crummy it all waswet, gray, faraway; and he lying there in bed, he seemed so small, and getting smaller. I would go out there with my mother, or sometimes alone, and sit beside the bed, the French nurses running in and out, and try to tell him things about my life, what-I-was-doing, because that seemed to please him. What I was doing. Nothing. I was in the Army. He had this funny idea, I remember, about the Army, about me and the Army, and he hated for me to tell him that I thought it all a lot of nonsense, or especially that I was messing around with it at all. Sometimes, in order to liven things up, I would tell him of some small adventure, an overstayed pass, a wangled assignmentand he really wouldnt have any of it. He wanted me to be a good boy in the Army. The sheet that covered him up to the neck, I remember, rose and fell with the slow rhythm of his breathing. The sound of his breathing filled the room. I talked informatively of the military life.