Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Read Free Page B

funeral—the tension, the unease, the constraint. It is always the same before a movie begins.
    Marcus has said in interviews and to disciples that a movie is a face. “People go to movies to spy on a face. If a movie gallops, only children are amused. A true film advances from gossip to weeping. In
Camille
you see Garbo first as a demimondaine, a very simple, very glamorous piece of gossip, but scene by scene the gossip becomes more complex, more details are added—she practices falsity, is ashamed of her body and herself, has a neurotic longing for honesty. Suddenly you get this breath, this sensation, My God, she really is a whore; she really does love that young man; he mustn’t marry a whore; oh, my God, how awful. And then you cry.”
    W HAT HE imagined Nanna’s expectations of a boarder to be caught like cobwebs at Marcus’s eyes and throat. (Marcus in the car traveling in the line of traffic on the Appia Antica places his hand on Jehane’s thigh, near her stomach; he folds his large hand over her flesh.) Marcus suffered from a form of asthma and breathed noisily. Nanna made much of the manners of Marcus’s half-brothers and half-sisters, who were soft-voiced and reserved, the children of the English Jewess his father had married two months after his divorce from Noreen. They werebetter-mannered than he was, but not as interested in pleasing Nanna. Doctors had said Marcus’s breathing was a physical affliction. Marcus was careful. He learned. He breathed quietly. Nanna said, “You see, the child’s not asthmatic.” Nanna did not always look at him; sometimes it seemed to him she imagined he was someone else. The school had written, “Mark has the capacity for brilliance but is eccentric in execution.” “In feeling, too,” the teacher had added when he spoke to Marcus’s father. At the moments when Marcus stammered, his mouth, awry with strain, resembled Nanna’s. He said, indicating the wicker furniture, the heavy sideboards, the Chinese bronzes, Japanese chests, and Corots his grandfather had collected, “This room has the r-richness of the Orient.” Nanna sighed. “Jews are often called Oriental. Do you know what fatalism is? It leaves out the will. I disapprove of that very much.” The minnow eyes struggled with momentary confusion. “What was I saying? Oh, yes. I loathe fatalism.” Marcus said, “The wind is rising. Look at the spray. The sea has crinkly, Jewish hair.” “I dislike poetic conversation,” Nanna said. Marcus asked, “What c-color were the P-Pyramids when you and Grandf-father were in E-Egypt? Was the sun very bright? Was the sand white or brown? Did your sit-upon h-hurt from riding on the camel?” Nanna said, “I did not know I remembered so clearly.” Marcus, in his desire to please, tended to mimic the grownups he was speaking to. He was small for his age (but he grew twelve inches in his first sixteen months with Nanna), and his mimicry unsettled adults. He would say, “Have you licked the crabgrass problem this year, Dr. Poore?” His voice was changing, and he was excitable and nervous. He saw that at the dinner table others made straight-angled and orderly remarks that were like toy wooden blocks. But he could produce nothing so regular, geometric, and gay; his conversational throat was a cave, and what came out was an overgallant compliment from his reading—“I’d g-give the g-golden apple to you, Mrs. Tredwell,” he said to one of Nanna’s guests, and blushed—or he spoke and Nanna lifted a hand to her hair as if to protect it against a bat Marcus had released to flitter around the dinner table: “People not t-talking about money is like people not talking about sex. I bet they don’t want to g-get excited in public.” He blurted once, “Do all women go cuckoo at menopause?” Nanna’s minnow eyes flickered and took refuge in distance. “Medical matters are not discussed at table, Marcus.”
    Outside the dining-room windows, Crimson Glory and