“I know.”
“Look at them now. Look at your hero, Jekel, in Berlin. What does he write? A ten-minute opus every other year.”
“Not my hero — my teacher.” Ramsay was secretly reassured. He admired his teacher but did not mind hearing him attacked.
“My mother thinks activity is genius,” he said, and smiled.
“He was a bit dotty at the end,” said Nanette, trusting Ramsay. She walked beside him with the docility of a little dog. As they passed the kitchen — Nanette staring straight before her and talking in a low voice — Ramsay turned and saw the face of the cook, which was frightened and haggard, and so exhausted that, although her eyes met Ramsay’s, she did not see he was there. The kitchen was on the north side of the house, under a long balcony; a single light above the stove had already been turned on, and the cook moved toward it and became saffron-colored. “They dote on her little boy and spoil him,” Ramsay said to himself, “but I have never even been told the cook’s name.”
“He was a bit touched, at the end,” Nanette said. “He was fond of Peggy in a senile way, but she was so stupid she didn’t seem to notice she was being pawed. He would offer to buy her presents, and she would simper and say no. Katharine was deathly afraid the child would tell her mother. That’s why she’s asked her back now; she wants to show it is a normal household.”
“Did Moser like living here?”
“It was his house.”
“You don’t feel he lived here. That piano …”
“He didn’t need a piano. He used to go for walks and be lost or tired, and then he would get some farmer to ring her. She was always rushing off in the car to bring him home. She would find him sitting in a hot kitchen, and he would get in the car smelling of cabbages and cooked fat. His clothes reeked of farm kitchens, but that isn’t to say he felt at home there either. He was never comfortable with country people. He would sit with his hands on his walking stick, waiting for Katharine. Katharine was foreign-looking, but she got to them. She would sit down, and she would just begin telling about herself and her bees, never asking questions. Why, I’ve seen farmers come to help her get a swarm back, and you know they don’t bother about each other, let alone strangers. As for him, oh, presently he began to hate walking. And the doctor said he had to walk, he had so much wrong with him. She had to coax him out, bribe him with caramels — because he wasn’t supposed to have them and they were a treat. ‘Just one ten-minute walk,’ I’ve heard her say, ‘ten out, ten back, twenty minutes in all,’ but he was too muddled to count. It was along here.” She meant the path where stones were now hurting Ramsay’s feet. He also was supposed to exercise, but he hated it. He trudged on with Nanette, counting ten out, ten back, twenty minutes in all. She plunged her hands in the pockets of her leather coat. Her Aberdeen Angus hair seemed to him touching. Old maid at twenty-seven, older than Katharine, she let her hands pull at the shape of her coat.
The old man was dragged for a walk along this road, Ramsay reflected, looking at the silken grasses he did not care to identify, though he knew they were not alike. Like Moser, he craved anything sweet. He would have gone to the village, but if he asked for the car, Katharine would know. She would have driven him, without reproach, but he did not want her to know. Ramsay saw the old man on a bench on this stony road with smuggled chocolate in his mouth. He broke off only one square and let it melt slowly. If the old man had chocolate, then he would look at anything she wanted — at fields and chalets catching the strong evening sunlight, and clouds going pink, and one cloud pressing like a headache on a peak. If he walked to the village — but that was impossible, he never would again, for it was thirty-five minutes down, even on the shortcut by the tracks, and nearly fifty back, because it was so steep. Perhaps she thought he was meditating here on the bench. He was huddled into his cape because the evening was suddenly cold. His intellect dissolved, his mind was like water, his powers centered only on the things to eat he was forbidden to have.
“This is where the picture was taken,” Ramsay said, stopping before the bench. “The old man, with Katharine beside him. Now I know why he looked in exile. He had to go for walks, and he couldn’t eat what he wanted. Like a kid.”
Nanette looked at the bench too. “Everyone in music is childish,” she said. “Our mothers stand beside us when we practice, from the age of four.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Musicians live between their mothers and their confessors, forever and ever. If they lose them, they find substitutes. They invent them. Marry them. They marry one or the other. Always two in their lives, you’ll notice. The mother and the confessor.”
“No, it is not childish,” Ramsay was saying to himself. “I know that I am not childish, I am older than my parents, but sometimes, even when I am not hungry …” He stopped; it was too secret. Then, crossing his mind, unsummoned, came “cruelty.” It was only a word, a tag on a tree; it was like Katharine’s voice saying “larch,” “spruce,” “acacia.”
“He should have been in a city,” said Ramsay. “It’s as simple as that. That mania he had for collecting, even. It’s a clue. They are all things you use in cities — pieces of metal, paper clips.”
“A simple case of thrift,” said Nanette. “Very Swiss.”
He looked down at her face. “Where’s your home?” he said. “Where are you from?”
“I’ve told you. Ascona.” Her face seemed smaller all at once. “All right. From Vienna. Before that, Poland. Now you know everything. If you want the whole truth, the real truth, he didn’t like foreigners. He made horrible jokes about Jews in front of me, to see if I would laugh.” All Nanette had done was apply a new name, just as Katharine had said grass was millet. Ramsay would see her now wearing a tag. They heard cowbells from the valley. “Katharine thinks they sound like Oriental music,” she said, smiling miserably.
“Shows how much she knows about that.”
But she would not follow up what she had been saying. Without meaning to, he had made her unhappy. She talked as if they had only just met, and began all over again about the racial question in the United States.
Ramsay had accepted the old man’s bed, but the bath repelled him. He was glad when, one day, the taps ran nothing but rust and he was obliged to share one of the bathrooms in the house. He came into an early-morning house, with the cook stirring and the little boy eating bread on the stairs, and Nanette, encountered in the hall, wearing a striped bathrobe. Nanette had left the room full of steam and lavender. Wet washcloths festooned the tub. He removed a wire hanger holding six stockings, and, just before he turned the shower on, he listened to church bells and to thunder. Ten minutes later the lawn was obliterated by gray smoke. The tree where Pip had hunted was still. Over the thunderclap came more bells, as if to silence the sky. The wind rose all in a moment, and the first drops of rain were flung against the house. By the time he had finished shaving, soft silent rain fell from a bright sky. The air was cold. Birds sang, but the strongest sound was a brook. Now a voice covered it — Katharine’s voice, complaining about last night’s supper. “The soup was out of a can, the hamburger was cooked black, and I don’t call half a slice of tinned pineapple on a bit of rusk a pudding. It really is unfair — I take the boy over entirely. I keep him out of the kitchen. You’ve got nothing to do but the meals. As for the salad, there was too much vinegar and too much oil. I don’t know how you manage to have too much of both.”