American Stranger Read online

  “Telephone your brother and tell him you’re going to New York with a friend.”

  “He knows about you. He knows that we live together and that you’re more than a friend.”

  “What does he think about that?”

  “He’s happy for me. And I know he’d be happy for me to go to New York with you.”

  “He won’t mind taking care of your mother alone?”

  “He’s always telling me not to come on the weekends, always telling me to stay in Boston with you, always telling me that he’ll take care of our mother.”

  “Call him now.”

  While he was on the telephone with Cyriac, Nancy listened to him speak the French she didn’t understand, and she didn’t understand it, she thought, because it wasn’t anything like the French she had learned.

  Hanging up the receiver, he said, “He said he’s glad I’m getting away.”

  “And your mother?”

  “He said my mother is glad too. My mother tells me, for my sake, that I should get away.” He added, “This will be the first Easter I’ll be away from her.”

  “Does that worry you?”

  “I don’t know. I go back, I go back to be with her every Sunday for Mass, because, you see, there’s so little that keeps her alive, so little, and I try to give her some reason to go on living, and my going to Mass with her every Sunday gives her some small reason.”

  As they spoke, Nancy once again thought that she wasn’t interested in Yvon’s mother, and not really in his relationship with her, and yet she had never spoken so intimately with him about what must have mattered to him most.

  Rain fell. The green interstate highway sign indicating the turnoff for Providence was dripping with rain. Yvon said, “Providence,” then he went deeply silent as they passed all the turnoffs to his city.

  Narrowing her eyes to see past the windshield wipers, she asked, “Do you really feel you can do something to help your mother?” and she thought that someone else, not she, had spoken.

  “Oh,” Yvon said, “no, not really.”

  “But you go.”

  “I go.”

  He didn’t want to continue with the talk, and neither did she, but to show she was attentive to him, Nancy now asked, “What does your brother print?”

  “He prints calling cards, leaflets for sales at the grocery, funeral cards, things like that for the parish.”

  He himself wasn’t interested; eager to take in everything they passed, Yvon pointed out to Nancy, she didn’t know why, a waterworks with water fountaining in round pools, an electrical power installation behind a chain-link fence, a cinder-block warehouse covered with spray-can graffiti. When they drove along the shore of Long Island Sound, he looked out at the gray water and gray sky. They stopped for a late lunch at a roadside restaurant, where Yvon kept rearranging the knives and forks on the plastic-topped table.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he said, “Cyriac asked me to give you his best regards.”

  “Thank him for me.”

  “And so did my mother.”

  “You mother did?”

  “You heard her. My mother told you that she wants me to be happy.”

  Yvon insisted on paying the check and left too big a tip.

  As if of themselves, lights of the city were beginning to switch on. Yvon, carrying their bags along the sidewalk of the side street, looked up to the right and left. A light went on in the window of a brownstone, revealing a woman wearing only panties.

  Nancy said hi to the doorman of her building, and Yvon said hi to him also, his hi a little more friendly than hers. In the elevator he studied the wood paneling, the brass plate with brass buttons to press for the floors, and on the landing where they got off he studied the wallpaper patterned with fleurs-de-lys and a table with a vase below a mirror.

  She opened the door of the apartment with her key and called out that she was home, but no one answered. Yvon followed her into the living room where a low-lit floor lamp with a big shade half illuminated the Biedermeier furniture, and she thought how strange this must all be for Yvon, who said nothing; she wanted it all to be strange to him and, with him here, she wanted it all to be strange to her, too. The floor-length curtains were drawn.

  Nancy said, “No one’s home.”

  She brought Yvon along the hallway into her room, where the bed, covered neatly with its white satin spread and many small white-satin-covered pillows, was made up as her bed in Boston was never made up.

  Nancy said, “I’ll show you where you’ll be staying.”

  They went back along the hallway and into the dining room, where the wide dining table, holding a small but fully rigged silver galleon as a centerpiece, was surrounded by many chairs; a big painting of a platter of fruit above the buffet tipped out a little from the wall. Nancy pushed open a swinging door at the far side of the dining room and held it for Yvon.

  She said, as they entered the kitchen, “I hope it’s all right for you, staying in the maid’s room. We don’t have a guest room except for this.”

  “I don’t mind anything,” he said.

  Off the kitchen, the maid’s room was painted pale yellow and had a built-in wardrobe, also painted pale yellow. The narrow bed was covered with a pale yellow spread.

  “But where’s the maid?” Yvon asked, dropping his case.

  “We don’t have a live-in maid,” Nancy answered. She put her arms around him and kissed him and whispered, “You’ll come to my room after everyone else is asleep.”

  “Supposing they find out?”

  “They’ll make sure they don’t find out,” Nancy said, and she left him to go to her room with her case.

  She found her mother in the living room, where, now, the lights were brighter. Her mother was wearing a silk scarf loosely over her shoulders. When Nancy kissed her on the cheek, her mother said, “I just got back from the hairdresser,” and with the red-nailed tips of her fingers she touched her bare nape. Her mother’s hair was set in the smooth and even curves it was always set in. She said, “There’s something I want to tell you, but I can’t remember what.”

  “It’ll come to you,” Nancy aid.

  Her mother asked, “Where’s your friend?”

  “Unpacking in the maid’s room.”

  “How much did he bring with him that it’s taking him so long to unpack?” Mrs. Green almost never smiled, so Nancy never knew if she was joking or not, and always presumed she was.

  “I’ll go see,” Nancy said.

  “Tell me a little more about him.”

  “You mean to ask, is he Jewish?”

  “Please, you know me better than that.”

  “He’s French.”

  “French, is he? Where is he from?”

  “From Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “French from Providence, Rhode Island? What kind of Frenchman comes from Providence, Rhode Island? Does he speak French?”

  “He does,” Nancy said. “I guess I’d better go find out what’s taking him so long.”

  “I hope he didn’t come with black tie, expecting we’d be formal,” her mother said. Again, Nancy wasn’t sure if this was joking.

  Yvon was sitting motionless on the maid’s bed. She went to the door and asked, quietly, “Do you want to stay here or come out and meet my mother?”

  Yvon jumped up and said, “I’ve just been waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “I thought it’d be more polite to wait for you to come for me.”

  “Why?”

  “In case I met someone I hadn’t been introduced to, wandering around looking for you.”

  “But all you’d have had to do was introduce yourself. They know you’ll be staying. Come and speak with my mother.”

  As he followed her she thought, if he didn’t impress her parents in
any other way, he’d impress them with his politeness. He reached out a hand to Mrs. Green, who sat still for a moment to look at him, though she always seemed, in looking at someone or something, to be thinking about someone or something else. She said, “Nancy tells me you’re French,” and he answered yes he was. He stood where he was until she told him to sit. She was a tall, thin woman with pale skin and russet in her gray, molded hair. He sat in a chair angled to one side of the sofa, and Nancy, inserting both her hands under her own long, loose hair, shook her head and sat on the armchair to the other side. Yvon sat on the edge of his chair.

  He said to Mrs. Green, “You have beautiful furniture.”

  She appeared to be thinking, not about the furniture or what Yvon had said about it, but about something that distracted her, and when she looked at Yvon, she said, flatly, “Oh, thank you.”

  “Really beautiful.”

  As if Yvon presented to her an opportunity to refer to something she assumed he knew nothing, or hardly anything, about, Nancy said to him, “Mom and Dad brought it all from Berlin.”

  But her mother said, “No. When we were able, we bought it all in New York.”

  Nancy, frowning, leaned forward. “You bought it all in New York?”

  “When we were able.”

  “The ice buckets,” Nancy asked, “you bought those in New York?”

  “We did, yes.”

  Nancy sat back.

  Yvon said, “It looks very expensive.”

  Mrs. Green smiled just enough for the corners of her lips to rise, and she said to Yvon, “Nancy says you speak French,” but she seemed not to be entirely aware of what she was saying.

  “Oui, je parle français,” he said.

  “And you speak French at home?”

  “French and English.”

  Mrs. Green kept her eyes on Yvon; for once she actually seemed not to be distracted by something else. She said, “I would have kept up my French, naturally I should have kept up my French.”

  “I’ll go get us some tea,” Nancy said, and rose.

  Her mother stopped her. “I know what I wanted to tell you. Gil and Maria have invited us for seder.”

  “Ma,” Nancy said.

  “I know, I know.” Mrs. Green drew the corners of the silk scarf to cover her shoulders more closely. “Should I say we won’t come?”

  “I don’t know, Ma,” Nancy said again, and left.

  Her mother called, “Nance,” and Nancy reappeared in the double doorway, the wide white doors with round brass knobs open on either side of her. Her mother said, “There was something else.” She thought. “But I’ve forgotten.”

  As Nancy left again, she heard Yvon ask her mother, “What’s a seder?”

  In the kitchen, preparing tea, it occurred to Nancy that she had wondered, at passing moments, how the furniture had been sent to New York from Berlin, because she hardly knew more than that her parents had left Berlin in a hurry. Maybe there was not much more to know. The question was: why did her parents want German-inspired furniture, why had they bought German porcelain ice buckets if Germany was a place they had to escape from?

  She returned to the living room carrying a silver tray with a teapot and cups and saucers and a sugar bowl with tiny silver tongs and a milk pitcher and a dish of round slices of lemon and a silver tea strainer. Yvon got up quickly to take it from her and bring it, carefully, to the coffee table, as Mrs. Green told him to do. And as her mother poured out tea from a silver pot into a china cup, Nancy, with a little jolt, heard Yvon ask her, “And what else do you remember from Germany?” Not responding at first, Nancy’s mother asked Yvon if he liked sugar and milk or lemon. He said milk and sugar, three lumps. Handing him the cup, she said to him, quietly, “What do I remember?” and Nancy, for the first time she could recall, heard her mother and someone her mother had just met talk about her childhood in Berlin. It wasn’t that Nancy hadn’t heard it before—her mother, sitting in the music room with her sister’s beau, listening to her sister play notes that they had to try to identify—but she had never heard her mother talk about it in response to questions asked by a friend she had brought home, a friend from her mother had no idea where. When her mother said, “But you can’t be interested,” Yvon leaned forward and said, “But I am,” and leaning further forward asked, “Did you ever walk under the linden trees in the spring?” Mrs. Green said, “Yes, we did, we did, I was a little girl, but I remember,” and, untying the silk scarf and slipping it off her shoulders onto her lap and slowly folding it, said, “They were lovely.”

  Nancy was embarrassed that Yvon was asking her mother about a past her mother never spoke of to anyone not Jewish, and hardly to any Jew, and she wanted to get Yvon away. She suggested to him that they take a walk.

  Before they left, Nancy’s mother said to Yvon, “I hope you don’t think we’re very formal here. Nancy’s father doesn’t wear a tie to dinner.”

  “I told him,” Nancy said.

  Out on upper Fifth Avenue, Yvon kept looking across to the park, beyond the rough granite wall, its misty darkness lit in vague spots at distances from one another by greenish lamps.

  “Can we walk in there?” he asked.

  “I have never been in the park at night,” Nancy said.

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Let’s go in now,” he said.

  She asked, incredulous, “You want to go into the park now, in the dangerous dark?”

  “How dangerous is the dark?”

  “We could get killed.”

  Laughing a little, Yvon said, “Come on, let’s go in.”

  “You go.”

  “Not without you.”

  Hitting him on his shoulder, she too laughed a little and said, “Some other time, when we’re good and ready to die. For now, let’s get back to the apartment.”

  The apartment again seemed empty. Nancy said she’d have a bath and see Yvon in an hour in the living room, but, after an hour and a half, he wasn’t there; she went to his room, where he was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a jacket and tie, waiting. She took him by the hand and led him out.

  Her mother and father were in the living room.

  As her father shook Yvon’s hand, Nancy saw her father as a short, dark, bald man whose chin was so small it seemed to be one with his Adam’s apple, and, yes, his hairy ears were big. He was wearing an open-collared shirt and a cardigan and slippers. His small hand fit into Yvon’s big hand.

  When they sat down at the dining table, a black woman came in from the kitchen with a platter of asparagus with silver tongs. Nancy introduced Hilda to Yvon, who, in too high a voice, said, “Hi, Hilda.” She answered, in a low voice, “Hello, sir.” Mr. Green took the asparagus with his fingers.

  Nancy said to him, “Mom told me that Maria insists we go to her and Gil’s for seder.”

  Maybe Nancy was imagining it, but she thought that Yvon couldn’t decide whether to take the asparagus with his fingers or the tongs, and, after some deliberation, used the tongs.

  Mr. Green said to Nancy, “And do we have to go?”

  Mrs. Green sighed. “How can we not go?”

  “We could use Yvon as an excuse,” Mr. Green said and laughed a low laugh.

  “I’ve never been to a seder,” Yvon said.

  In her nightgown, Nancy lay on her bed, the bedside light on, and saw by the clock under the lamp that a half hour had passed since she had told Yvon to come to her room. She went out and peered past his door, ajar, to see him sitting in a chair. He was wearing pajamas, a striped robe with a fancy twisted belt that ended with a tassel about his waist, and felt slippers. She had the curious sense that he was waiting, not for her, but for someone else. The sight of him wearing clothes she had never seen him wear, pajamas and a robe and slippers that he had no doubt thought he should have for his visit to New York
, made her smile, and going to him her smile widened.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you,” he said.

  She took him by the hand. Her room went totally dark when, in bed with him, she switched off her bedside lamp. He didn’t move or speak.

  “Put the light on,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I want to see you.”

  Reaching out in the dark, she touched the lamp and switched it on, and he, studying her face, lightly ran a finger over her chin, her nose, her cheeks, her forehead.

  He said, “If I had been introduced to your mother as Irish, or Italian, or as Yankee, or, even more, if I were black, she’d have known exactly what to think of me. She has no idea what I am. I don’t want anyone to know. I’m just an American.”

  To Nancy, the excitement of having sex with Yvon, though subdued, was that it was occurring in her home, in her room, in the bed she grew up in, where fantasies had originated and risen and risen and were now realized by the real body in her arms.

  And perhaps the also-subdued excitement for Yvon was that he had never before made love in such a home, room, bed.

  “Let’s sleep now,” she said, and he did what she told him to do.

  She woke to her father calling her mother’s name. Light showed round the dark blind over the window. Then she reached out and found that Yvon had gone.

  She found him and her mother having breakfast in the kitchen; they went silent when she entered, and she asked, “What were you talking about?”

  “Your mother was telling me more about Berlin.”

  Again, Nancy was astonished by her mother’s willingness to reveal memories that normally she kept private. As if realizing this herself, Mrs. Green said nervously that Gil and Maria had told her everyone should arrive before sunset, but Nancy insisted that for Maria sunset had never meant having to arrive before or after it, and she was not going to make an effort to comply.

  She dutifully showed Yvon the sights of New York City for hours; she was glad that he didn’t make many comments, and was even gladder when he said she must be tired and they should get back to the apartment. In the late afternoon she deliberately took her time getting ready, and when she and Yvon and her parents were in a taxi to Gil and Maria’s apartment on West End Avenue, the sky was so darkly overcast it wouldn’t have been possible to say the sun had set or not.