In memory my forehead is pressed against her round side and I am listening to the thin, metallic sound of milk shooting into the pail, which at a certain point, with seeming inattention, she will step in with a dirty rear hoof. I can only guess why this gave her pleasure.
She was, for a long time we hoped it — we had taken her in the car to her “wedding”—carrying a kid. Finally it was apparent. She was provided with a bed of fresh straw, to which she seemed indifferent, and one winter morning before school the children came running into the kitchen to say that there were four extra legs in the shed!
I have forgotten what we named Lily’s child, but in a matter of a day or two she was climbing the stone walls with her mother and learning the fundamentals of disdain.
I had my picture taken with Lily, holding her close while she looked the other way. One leg with its blackened, worn knee is visible and her mouth has the trace of a triumphant smile.
We were living in isolation. I had no one to talk to aside from my wife, no one whose opinion I could seek about what I had written. Late one afternoon I finished a story — it was about a man whose imaginary life slowly consumes his identity until ordinary events become fantastic — and in the panic that followed I gave it to my wife to read, desperate for a response. It was compelling, it was not. I went for a walk in the dusk. The path was desolate late in the year, but the house was lighted and alive as I returned. She was in the kitchen preparing supper. “Well, what did you think?” I asked.
“About what?”
“The story.”
“I couldn’t make head or tail of it,” she remarked.
In time we met people, among them John Collier and his wife. He was, at that time, essentially a scriptwriter. He had strong leftist convictions, though they did not affect his manner of living, which was lordly, if thinly funded. He had come through everything, marriages, leaving England, the blacklist, financial ruin, and somehow made it to shore near Grasse in a huge country house said to have once been the property of Pauline Bonaparte. He readily admitted his mistakes, they came bobbing along behind. He had been offered The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to write when he was working in Los Angeles, but failed to see a film in it. He was luckier with The African Queen and had a profitable interest, even though his script was not used.
He was in his sixties, smiling, cherubic, not old, still quite green in fact, virtually a youth, he concluded. Nimble and rosy-cheeked, his thrusts were light as air. One time he came to ask if Harriet, his wife, could borrow some birth-control pills. My wife apologized, she was sorry but she didn’t have any extra. “Well,” he said unperturbedly, almost gaily, “I guess I’ll have to come over here.”
The Colliers belonged to a small beach club — there were many of them — to the west of Cannes, where Picasso sometimes came; the owners possessed a napkin on which he had once sketched a fish. We swam there and farther along where there was nothing, only a lengthy strip of bare sand. The sea was our chief pleasure. Fleeing from the waves or dashing into them, lying up by the rocks, wind-sheltered, there was the sense that time and events had stopped. We drove back, wearied by the sun, at day’s end to the immemorial house where the goat waited, a sentry on the roof.
The mail, when it came, was laid by the postman on a table in the entrance hall. The telephone, with its shrill, disquieting sound, rarely rang. I sat on the balcony at a worn wooden table and wrote. Racers breaking their legs on icy runs seemed far away, but page by page I assembled lines to be typed by a woman in Grasse. I cannot recall if the Mediterranean was visible from where I sat, but from the floor above it was, in the afternoon, blinding and white.
The sea remains, the dense fragrance on the road past the perfume factories, the daily Nice-Matin with its glaring stories of crime and car accidents. Otéro, penniless and aged, the Venus of the century before, died in Nice that year. She is mentioned in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa: old Mr. Bulpett announces that he appears in La Belle Otéro’s memoirs, as a young man who went through a hundred thousand for her sake within six months — this was pounds, when the pound was tremendous.
“And do you consider,” he was asked, “that you did have full value?”
After a moment’s thought, he replied, “Yes. Yes, I had.”
One night in May I had a dream of intense power — my daughter had become ill. I could not believe the seriousness, it was so sudden. In the dream she died. I was numb with sorrow. I told her brother and sisters. I went into the room where she lay, her beautiful face now closed, her long hair. Suddenly I was felled by it, brought to my knees. Tears poured down my cheeks. She was dead.
You cannot believe in dreams and yet, at some level, you must. The pharaoh dreamed. Macbeth.
The next morning there was a boil, like a stigma, in her left nostril. By nightfall she was desperately sick. The doctor pronounced it serious, an infection. The danger was that it could go to the brain. There was a vein that ran here, by the nose, he said. An infection on the face was not bad, but here … Above all, it should be energetically treated.
By the next day, pus was running. The nurse who was to give an injection didn’t come. We drove to town. My daughter was eleven, the age of perfection. By now her lip was swollen, as thick as my thumb.
In the hospital they placed a lead shield over her eyes. She lay inert on a white table, two small pillows on either side of her head. My hand was held tightly by hers, I wanted to pull her back, to this world, to my desperate embrace. A square of light from an ominous machine was being moved onto her face with a shadowed + in the center of it.
“Don’t move,” the doctor said in French. “You must remain perfectly still for two or three minutes.”
Behind the lead shield I could see her very blue, open eyes. The doctor left the room. A sound began, a low, persistent sound of voltage. She was motionless. The muzzle of the machine was only inches above her face. The square of light was the size of one’s palm. We were helpless. I was sure she was going to die.
At one time in my journals, beneath the date I had written, Every year seems the most terrible, but that was self-pity. Anyone might have written that. The most terrible thing is the death of a child, for whom you would do so much, for whom you can do nothing. I had heard of the death of children and seen them lying helpless, but it was an arrow that would never be aimed your way.
Nina, my daughter, lived, but twelve years afterwards her older sister, Allan, died tragically. I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child. It was an electrical accident. It happened in the shower. I found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. I felt for her heartbeat and hurriedly carried her, legs across one arm, limp head along the other, outside. Thinking she had drowned, I gave her artificial respiration desperately, pressing down hard on her chest and then breathing into her mouth time after time. Nothing. I kept at it. An ambulance came. Someone pronounced her dead. I could not believe it.
I did not know what to do. In the house I laid my head on the edge of the bed and began reciting over and over the only recollected psalm.
Even if the rest get through, there is always the thought of that one.
—
“There has been an accident at Cape Canaveral.” These words were repeated endlessly one night — it was in 1967, too — like the news of a great disaster, like war. Grissom and White had both been killed. Something lodged in my chest, a feeling I could not swallow. “There has been an accident …”