The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (17 page)

So that was that. Far from begging him to change his mind, the master accepted his resignation coldly. Like most blows, Edward took this one without flinching. It was Iris who panicked. And who can blame her? In the course of a single day, her notion of her own future—as the charming wife of a charming don—had gone out the window. Of course, she had known that Edward could be capricious. What she had not guessed was that his caprice could carry him to such an extreme. And still she stood by him. She saw no alternative.

The next step was to decide where to settle. She had come into her inheritance, so money was not a problem. Edward said he wanted to go to New York, to see the great-aunt of whom he was so fond. Under her tutelage, he thought he could finish the book that was supposed to be his dissertation. It was during the crossing that the child was conceived.

Oh, the child! That really was the fatal blow. In Lisbon, Julia told me, Iris carried pictures of the girl in her pocketbook. She was very pretty—and, according to Iris, her lovely head was so empty it might have been made of porcelain. Iris was afraid to handle her—in case, in her clumsiness, she should drop her and that porcelain head should shatter. Whereas Edward adored his daughter without pity or guilt. He would talk to her for hours, undeterred by her failure to show even a glimmer of response. Or he would play with her, throwing her up into the air and catching her again. The spectacle
of their capering disarmed his wife. She felt rebuked, rebuffed. Did he not realize that in being born, the child had nearly killed her? Not only that, since her arrival, he had not written a word of his book. And so when Iris conceived the notion of putting the girl in an institution—not an especially outrageous notion in those days—she was able to tell herself that it was for Edward’s sake. The mistake she made was not giving him a chance to object.

It was then that they took that legendary trip to California—and as they trundled across the Midwest, poor Iris had no idea, no idea whatsoever, that she had just guaranteed what in the courts they call the alienation of her husband’s affections. This was not entirely her fault. I don’t believe Edward ever communicated to her the degree of his resentment over her decision to put the child away. I don’t even know that he ever communicated it to himself.

So it was that the girl ended up in a gruesome state mental hospital that had the sole advantage of being a few hours’ drive from Edward’s mother—and from which his mother had the good sense, in a matter of days, to rescue her. And thank God she did. His mother—by all accounts a weird woman, a holder of séances and pursuer of psychical phenomena—was the silver lining on
that
cloud. For had it not been for her, the girl would have languished in that institution for the rest of her days, instead of which she grew up among the Theosophists, who regarded her as a kind of silent sibyl, through whom they hoped to make contact with their masters. Certainly a better life than the one to which the State of California would have sentenced her, and probably a better life than she would have led with her parents.

After that, Edward’s book was abandoned, along with his child and the sexual side of his marriage—this last loss a double-edged sword for Iris, whose fear of conceiving another idiot exceeded her fear of losing her husband to another woman, though only by a hair.
They sailed to France, where they took up their vagabond life—that life of Daisy running up and down the corridors of first-class hotels—not because either of them especially craved itinerancy, but because neither had the disposition for settlement. For Iris, as Edward had observed, felt at home nowhere, whereas Edward had a habit of becoming besotted with a place until his infatuation soured into boredom, his boredom into depression, and he suffered what Iris called an “episode.” The episode of the six bottles of champagne. The episode of the mixed-up pills. The episode of the train tracks. The episode of the fifth-floor balcony. And then, perhaps four years into their sojourn in the fairyland forlorn that was Jazz Age Europe, the episode of Alec Tyndall.

Now, Alec Tyndall—to hear Edward tell it, he was a bit player in the drama: the accidental instigator, first, of Xavier Legrand’s accidental career and, second, of the “arrangement” by which he sent men to Iris in the night. My hunch, though, is that the role he played was far more crucial than that. For before Alec Tyndall, Edward had not realized that he could love another man.

Well, who can say what it was about Alec Tyndall that turned the tables for him? I certainly can’t, never having met him. Probably to any eye other than Edward’s, he was nothing special; a married businessman in his thirties; as unremarkable as … well, as I am.

And maybe that was the appeal. At the British Bar, Iris had told me that she assumed it would be some absurdly handsome youth who would “slay” Edward. Yet the truth is, no handsome youth could have slayed Edward. Edward was unslayable by handsome youth. Instead, what was fatal to him was the clumsy touch of a flawed and ordinary man.

Anyway, Tyndall—that was, for Iris, the beginning of her exile in the desert, her epoch of temptations and trials. When she opened her door to him that night, she could not at first believe her eyes.
Then his avid presence began to make a horrible kind of sense. For just that week Edward had had another episode, this one involving a borrowed revolver. Now she thought she understood why.

And so she allowed Tyndall into her bed—because she loved Edward. And yet what does that mean—that she loved Edward? I mean, if you put a drop of that vital fluid under a microscope, what would you see?

In Iris’s case, I think what you would see would mostly be fear: fear of the earth opening up under her feet, fear of Edward’s loss—which meant her own. She thought that she loved him as a saint loves God. Yet isn’t the love of saints a kind of monstrosity? Saint Agatha with her breasts on a plate, Saint Lucy with her eyes on a plate … Wherever she turned, little red-tailed devils plagued her. Being devils, they knew exactly where to aim their pokers: at her pride. You might think they urged Iris into Tyndall’s bed. No! They tried to keep her out of it. And what an ordeal it was, resisting their implorations, and submitting instead to the mortification of the flesh—her own flesh—that her love of Edward demanded. And not even Mrs. Tyndall cared. For this was France in, I believe, 1927. Infidelity was de rigueur. In sleeping with Tyndall, Iris was betraying no one but herself.

Now, let me return to Edward. I have mentioned the episode of the borrowed revolver. I have not mentioned the person from whom it was borrowed: an elderly Englishman, jovial and tipsy, who happened to be present when Edward pointed that revolver at his head, and who proved instrumental in convincing him to put it down. In fact, that Englishman might have been the most sensible person ever to stumble into their lives, for once the crisis was averted, he took Iris aside and said, “Your husband is a troubled chap. If I were you, I’d get him to a doctor.” And at this advice she bristled—not just because she feared what a doctor, were one to be summoned,
might say; not just because she considered the Englishman impertinent; but because, in suggesting that Edward was “ill,” the old man had failed to appreciate her husband’s genius—which, she was certain, explained, even excused, his putting a revolver to his head. Of course, in the long run it would have been better if she had heeded the Englishman’s advice. At the very least it would have saved her some time. Instead she went up to her room and started packing. Three hours later, they left—the first of many precipitous departures, all before dawn, and all at Iris’s instigation, as if by fleeing to another hotel, another beach, another town, they could leave Edward’s difficulty behind. But it always followed them.

After that, things got worse. At the new hotel, Edward refused to get out of bed. This impeded the maids in their efforts to make up the room. The maids “talked.” The talk led to speculation among the other guests as to whether the odd American in 314 might have anything to do with certain rumors that had recently come in, as if by carrier pigeon, from up the coast.

Alas, Iris took this gossip more seriously than she did her husband’s condition. Now it was Edward who was asking for a doctor. Every day, he said, he could feel himself sinking deeper into the “slough of despond”—a phrase she could not place, but which, in its very allusiveness, affirmed, to her ear, the vigor of his intelligence and the breadth of his learning and gave her the excuse she needed to deprecate his ailment. For her notion of psychiatric illness, even by the standards of the times, was crude—another benefit of her Catholic upbringing. What Edward needed wasn’t a doctor, she insisted; it was fresh air, wholesome food, sunlight—a point she underscored by flinging open the curtains—at which he groaned. Now, as much as she could, she stayed in his room with him—until, one afternoon, the necessity to purchase certain items too intimate to entrust to a servant impelled her to make a brief
foray into town. A mistake, as it turned out. For no sooner had she left than Edward, on his own, telephoned the hotel manager and asked for a doctor. It was, he said, an emergency. And so when Iris returned, it was to find the NE PAS DÉRANGER sign hanging from his door handle, and two old women loitering near the elevators. Not recognizing her as the wife, they informed her that the American in 314 had had “some kind of breakdown.”

“Nonsense,” Iris replied. “My husband has a cold. That is why he has been in bed these last few days.” She then pushed past the two women and went into her own room, which adjoined his. Here she found Daisy whimpering by the connecting door. She gathered the dog to her breast and waited, braced for the worst, already planning their departure and anticipating their next port of call.

Twenty minutes later, the door opened. The doctor came in. “Are you Mrs. Freleng?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Well, I’ve examined your husband,” he said, “and there’s nothing wrong with him except that he’s a garden-variety neurasthenic. You find them by the thousand in these places.”

She was about to reply that her husband was not a garden-variety anything when Edward himself appeared. To her amazement, he had gotten dressed. He seemed immensely pleased—both by the doctor’s diagnosis and by the proposed treatment: a month’s stay at one of those
maisons de repos
in which the Swiss specialize, along with just about every other means of profiting from human misery and human greed. And this, to Iris, was the most confounding thing of all. For she had always taken it for granted that Edward was unique and special, and that therefore any malady from which he suffered would be a unique and special malady. And so the fact that Edward himself should welcome the news that he was just another
idle, hotel-dwelling neurotic left her at a loss for words. She was, as the English say, gobsmacked.

The next day, they left for Switzerland, for the
maison de repos
, where Edward proved to be a model patient, submitting meekly to every order his nurses issued, no matter how arbitrary. And this was the man who, not so many years before, had renounced his Cambridge fellowship rather than knuckle under to afternoon tea!

Well, perhaps you see what I am getting at. At heart Edward was, I think, quite a modest person. The urges by which he was entranced and tortured were modest urges. He appreciated the doctor’s diagnosis for the same reason that Iris disdained it: because it established his membership in the fraternity of ordinary men, even as it confirmed what he had suspected all along: He was no genius. He was no Great Force. His mind was sharp enough to perceive its own limits, not to transcend them. And this may have been why he was drawn to Alec Tyndall, and to me, and why he felt such fondness toward his daughter—because we did not require him to be remarkable.

And so Edward spent
three
months at the
maison de repos
. Loyal spouse that she was, Iris put up the whole time at a hotel down the road. Every day she brought Daisy to visit him. He would take her into the garden, where she would sniff at the edelweiss or whatever it is that grows in Swiss gardens. True to its name, the
maison de repos
put much stock in resting. Its inmates were required to rest something like twelve hours a day—and this suited Edward perfectly. So did the meals, which were ample and rich in the manner of nurseries: everything buttered and creamed and breaded, no bony fish to dismantle, no innards or brutish singed steaks. This is not to say that he received no treatment. There was a psychiatrist at the
maison
, with whom Edward talked every day. Mostly he talked
about Cambridge—about how, in the wake of his resignation, a tranquillity unlike any he had ever known had suffused him. For at last he was free from the vagaries of human endeavor. And yet beyond the horizon of that great relief was great uncertainty. For what was he to do with the rest of his life?

Inimical as I may be to all things Swiss, I must allow that the
maison de repos
did Edward and Iris a world of good. Among other things, it gave them Xavier Legrand. Like their daughter, the author was conceived en route between two places—Montreux and Geneva, I believe, as they were returning to France following Edward’s treatment. At first Monsieur Legrand was merely a way of passing the time—and so they made the passing of time his raison d’être. Bored in his retirement, he had taken to novel writing as other pensioners take to watercolors. Of course, the fact that Tyndall had put the idea into Edward’s head lent the whole enterprise, for Iris, a slightly sordid air. And still she went along with it, both because Edward’s psychiatrist thought writing would be good for him and because, to her own surprise, she discovered that she rather enjoyed contriving plots. In Lisbon, Edward insisted that he had never cared much about the novels, that they were “Iris’s baby,” that in their production he was at most a glorified amanuensis. I am not at all sure, though, that this is true—for his fingerprints are all over them. And of course, the first of them gave him the excuse he needed to stay in touch with its inseminator and dedicatee, Alec Tyndall.