Chapter 22 The Sojourner-2

"I just had this day in town. I came home unexpectedly. You see, Papa died last week." "Papa Ferris is dead?" "Yes, at Johns-Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was down home in Georgia." "Oh, Im so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favorite people." The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mothers face. He asked, "Who is dead?" Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his fathers death. He saw again the outstretched body on the quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse flesh was bizarrely rouged and the familiar hands lay massive and joined above a spread of funeral roses. memory closed and Ferris awakened to Elizabeths calm voice.

"Mr. Ferris father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didn't know." "But why did you call him Papa Ferris?" Bailey and Elizabeth exchanged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the questioning child. "A long time ago," he said, "your mother and Mr. Ferris were once married. Before you were born -- a long time ago." "Mr. Ferris?" The little boy stared at Ferris, amazing and unbelieving. And Ferris eyes, as he returned the gaze, were somehow unbelieving too. Was it indeed true that at one time he had called this stranger, Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that They had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and -- finally -- endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels) destruction of the fabric of married love.

Bailey said to the children, "Its somebodys supper-time. Come on now." "But Daddy! Mama and Mr. Ferris -- I --" Billys everlasting eyes -- perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility -- reminded Ferris of the gaze of another child. It was the young son of Jeannine -- a boy of seven with a shadowed little face and knobby knees whom Ferris avoided and usually forgot . "Quick march!" Bailey gently turned Billy toward the door. "Say good night now, son." "Good night, Mr. Ferris." He added resentfully, "I thought I was staying up for the cake."

"You can come in afterward for the cake," Elizabeth said. "Run along now with Daddy for your supper." Ferris and Elizabeth were alone. The weight of the situation descended on those first moments of silence. Ferris asked permission to pour himself another drink and Elizabeth set the cocktail shaker on the table at his side. He looked at the grand piano and noticed the music on the rack. "Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?" "I still enjoy it." "Please play, Elizabeth." Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readiness to perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.

She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridescent as a prism in a morning room. The first voice of the fugue, an announcement pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a second voice, and again repeated within an elaborated. frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with countless ingenuities -- now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a single rr thing that sues not fear to the whole. Toward the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched persistence on the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair back and closed his eyes. Silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.

"Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris --" A door was closed. The piano began again -- what was this music? Unplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of another time, another place -- it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, conflicts, ambivalent desires. Strange that the music, catalyst for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and dear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid. "Miz Bailey, dinner is out on the table now."

Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk. "Limprovisation de la vie humaine," he said. "Theres nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book." "Address book?" repeated Bailey. Then he stopped, noncommittal and polite. "Youre still the same old boy, Johnny," Elizabeth said with a trace of the old tenderness. It was a Southern dinner that evening, and the dishes were his old favorites. They had fried chicken and corn pudding and rich, glazed candied sweet potatoes. During the meal Elizabeth kept alive a conversation when the silences were overlong. Ferris was led to speak of Jeannine.

"I first knew Jeannine last autumn -- about this time of the year -- in Italy. Shes a singer and she had an engagement in Rome. I expect we will be married soon." The words seemed so true, inevitable, that Ferris did not at first acknowledge to himself the lie. He and Jeannine had never in that year spoken of marriage. And indeed, she was still married -- to a White Russian moneychanger in Paris from whom she had been separated for five years. But it was too late to correct the lie. Already Elizabeth was saying: "This really makes me glad to know. Congratulations, Johnny."

He tried to make amends with truth. "The Roman autumn is so beautiful. Balmy and blossoming." He added, "Jeannine has a little boy of six. A curious trilingual little fellow. We go to the Tuileries sometimes." A lie again. He had taken the boy once to the gardens. The slow foreign child in shorts that bared his spindly legs had sailed his boat in the concrete pond and ridden the pony. The child had wanted to go in to the puppet show. But there was not time, for Ferris had an engagement at the Scribe Hotel. He had promised they would go to the guignol another afternoon. Only once had he taken Valentin to the Tuileries.

There was a stir. The maid brought in a white-frosted cake with pink candles. The children entered in their night clothes. Ferris still did not understand. "Happy birthday, John," Elizabeth said. "Blow out the candles." Ferris recognized his birthday date. The candles blew out lingeringly and there was the smell of burning wax. Ferris was thirty-eight years old. "It's time you started for the theater." Ferris thanked Elizabeth for the birthday dinner and said the appropriate good-byes. The whole family saw him to the door. A high, thin moon shone above the jagged, dark skyscrapers. The streets were windy, cold. Ferris hurried to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. He gazed at the nocturnal city with the delicate attention of departure and perhaps farewell. He longed for flighttime and the coming journey.

The next day he looked down on the city from the air, burned in sunlight, toylike, precise. Then America was left behind and there was only the Atlantic and the distant European shore. The ocean was milky pale and placid beneath the clouds. Ferris dozed most of the day. Toward dark he was thinking of Elizabeth and the visit of the previous evening. He thought of Elizabeth among her family with longing, gentle envy and inexplicable regret. He sought the melody, the unfinished air, that had so moved him. The cadence, some unrelated tones, were all that remained; the melody itself evaded him. He had found instead the first voice of the fugue that Elizabeth had played -- it came to him, inverted mockingly and in a minor key. Suspended above the ocean the anxieties of transient and solitude no longer troubled him and he thought of his fathers death with equanimity. During the dinner hour the plane reached the shore of France. At midnight Ferris was in a taxi crossing Paris. It was a clouded night and mist wreathed the lights of the Place de la Concorde. The midnight bistros gleamed on the wet pavements. As always after a transocean flight the change of continents was too sudden. New York at morning, this midnight Paris. Ferris glimpsed the disorder of his life: the succession of cities, of transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the years, time always. "Vite! Vite!" he called in terror. "Depechez-vous." Valentin opened the door to him. The little boy wore pajamas and an outgrown red robe. His gray eyes were shadowed and, as Ferris passed into the flat, they flickered momentarily. "Jattends Maman." Jeannine was singing in a night dub. She would not be home before another hour. Valentin returned to a drawing, squatting with his crayons over the paper on the floor. Ferris looked down at the drawing -- it was a banjo player with notes and wavy lines inside a comic-strip balloon. "We will go again to the Tuileries." The child looked up and Ferris drew him closer to his knees. The melody, the unfinished music that Elizabeth had played, came to him suddenly. Unsought, the load of memory jettisoned -- this time bringing only recognition and sudden joy. "Monsieur Jean," the child said, "did you see him?" Confused, Ferris thought only of another child -- the freckled, family-loved boy. "See who, Valentin?" "Your dead papa in Georgia." The child added, "Was he okay?" Ferris spoke with rapid urgency: "We will go often to the Tuileries. Ride the pony and we will go into the guignol. We will see the puppet show and never be in a hurry any more." "Monsieur Jean," Valentin said. "The guignol is now closed." Again, the terror the acknowledgment of wasted years and death. Valentin, responsive and confident, still nestled in his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek and felt the brush of the delicate eyelashes. With inner desperation he pressed the child close -- as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time.