Alpine Giggle Week Read online

  Well. So anyway, we motored to Milan, and then took a train to Venice where we spent a simply lovely week. Why, it’s all true about Venice – there really is water in the streets! I had never taken it seriously for a minute. I hope to God Mr. B. has told you about it, for I am not the one who could ever report on Venice – and neither can Ruskin, the big stiff. All I can say is, anybody who goes anywhere else is fools. The only mitigating circumstance is that the Lido is horrible – just a great, ham [sic] public beach, backed up against shallow, soupy water, and populated with the horrors of both hemispheres. Well, when I tell you that J. P. McEvoy was present in a yellow peignoir, I think I have said all. . . . . . But we had a truly beautiful time, and as Ernest Hemingway said about a country bringing-up, it is something that nobody can ever take away from you. And who has seen Mr. Benchley in a gondola has Lived! I wish I wasn’t such a pig about hating things to be over. I want to go right back and do it all over again – and maybe sometime I will, because you see, that night I got to doing a bit of drinking, I threw my shoe into the Grand Canal, so I could consider myself wedded to the Adriatic.

  (I don’t think this is such a hot typewriter. German, indeed! Who won the war?)

  So then we came up through the Austrian Tyrol – which is the way mountains ought to be, and not like these big show-offs – to Munich; and let’s all go live there pretty soon, and to hell with this nonsense. And there, somehow or other, I got a little black dachshund, and even if Mr. B. told you about him, he didn’t say half enough, because he is the nicest little dog you ever knew. I had never done much about dachshunds, except to think they were pretty funny-looking, but after a little while, it’s other dogs that look funny. And the German originals don’t look like the great stuffed sofas I always have seen. This thing is very small, and almost degenerately long and attenuated. He looks like a Hunt Dietrich fire-screen. And is he a comfort in this lonely life!

  Robinson, his name is. Only these Goddamn Swiss call it – as near as I can spell it – Rrrobe-an-song, or even, sometimes, Le Rrrobe-an-song, which you will admit is a far cry from his kennel title of Eiko von Blütenburg. (I knew I’d find a use for that umlaut yet.)

  So then we went to Paris to put Mr. B. on the boat-train for the Bremen, which, as I scarcely need tell you, he just barely made. The one night we were there, we stopped at Florence’s for a few minutes, and it was just as horrible as it was in the old country, except there aren’t so many dusty imitation grape-leaves. And THAT was where I saw Lois Long, in the company of Townsend Martin, the Wickedest Woman in London – it’s a darn good thing, I think, for Mrs. Arno to have sought solace in travel, which brings one into contact with so many new and different types and surroundings, and thus broadens the soul. Mr. Martin is ever one who draws out the best in me; I told him, for want of news and also in the first flush of mother-love, that I had a little dachshund, and he said, “Oh, they’re always yapping.” To which I replied, without a moment’s hesitation, “So are you.” (“Dorothy Parker’s mordant wit has made her the toast of the town”: Milwaukee Sentinel.) Lois was in admirable shape, making no sense and but little sound, and with her eyes, like quarrelsome lovers, rushing in different directions and then coming back to cross each other. . . . . . Sometimes I think I’m not so damned homesick for New York, after all.

  So then we came right back here the minute Fred left, because Paris was so full of his ghost we couldn’t stand it. And it was even fuller of him here. It is awful, how we miss him.

  And was it crisp to get back here after having had a good time, and did Dow-dow get into one of his real pretties, and did Sara take refuge in tears, and did I get to brooding, and did we thus beguile the time till the accidents started happening!

  Scott Fitzgerald came up about ten days ago for a three-day visit, and I was so glad to see him that he misunderstood. I don’t say he is the inevitable companion I would choose out of the entire world, but babies, in this place you would be glad to see Johnny Weaver. And Scott was moderately sober, and pretty darn nice. Poor kid, he is living in Caux, near Montreux, and the little girl is in Brittany with a governess, and Zelda is in a sanatorium in Geneva. The sanatorium marks great progress – for a time, she was in an insane asylum. At first they thought it was hopeless, but now they think she can get out some time. Scott hasn’t been allowed to see her for months. . . . . I know they got to be awful pests and all that, but I always get sentimental about the Fitzgeralds. I can’t help seeing them as they were when they first came to New York, ten years ago – when they were just married, and he had just had his crazy success with “This Side of Paradise,” and they were the golden lad and the golden girl, if ever I saw them. And this is so damn dreary, for a conclusion. . . . Ah, hell. If I were a God, I’d be a God.

  Well, let’s see. Before I got my knee into shape, among those mentioned in Swiss social notes was my left thumb, which is nicely dislocated. It seems that about a month ago, I rose from my work – probably to vomit – slipped on a pair of mules which someone (it couldn’t have been me!) had left lying in the middle of the floor, and landed on my thumb, full weight – which, incidentally, is far more serious than it was when I Went Away from It All. I didn’t do anything about it, because I thought it might get to be all right (the Benchley school of thought). But when we got back from Paris, Gerald pushed me out to have a radiography – how is it you North Americans say? X-ray, is it not? At first they could discover nothing wrong, but that was traced to the fact that I had nervously put my right hand into the X-ray machine. (Dow-dow was nice about that.) So then they saw what it was, and I had to go every morning, and two doctors and a nurse got on the end of my thumb and pulled – I think they thought there was a paper cap in it. Then, just for luck, a folder of paper matches went off in my grasp, and fixed up the rest of the hand. Then I tripped over that root, and thus acquired my knee-trouble, and there you have the record of Baby’s Summer in the Shadow of the Matterhorn. . . . . . The pulling and the burn are all over now, although there is still a welter (Oh, wait a second! I can use it! “Welter hell with the whole thing.”), a welter of wet bandages on my thumb, covered with a red rubber apparatus that looks, if my memory serves me, startlingly like something intended to keep down the population. I think there is nothing like a rubber-capped thumb and a bandaged knee to render a woman practically irresistible. I will say, though, such matters pass here without comment. It is simply taken for granted that you have tuberculosis of the bone.

  And speaking of such things, I must tell you the height of consideration, as expressed by Hoytie Wiborg, who recently favored the Murphys with a visit, on her way to Sweden or Salzburg or Poland or wherever it was that she landed, for she is one who decides en route. One night we were sitting in the Murphys’ night-club, watching the lung-ers dance cautiously about, and it turned out that Hoytie didn’t feel well. “I think I’ll go home,” she said. “I can feel a cold in the head coming on, and I shouldn’t like to spread it around.”

  Dear kids, I am stricken when I think what a pig I have been about writing, but truly, truly it doesn’t mean either lack of thought or decrease of love. Only it’s damned near impossible to write from this place. It must be seen to be believed. It’s so out of joint with any other form of life that you can’t tell about it. “The Magic Mountain” is the nearest thing to it, and even that is an understatement. (Scott, by the way, is incensed that Thomas Mann has already done that book, because he wants to do one about a tuberculosis colony; having been here three days, he feels he is an authority.) My attitude toward the sicks has changed, since last Winter, when I spent too damn much time in being sorry for them. Now they just disgust me. Honest, you don’t have to pity them – they’re all right. It sounds hard-boiled, I know, but it’s undoubtedly more normal to feel like this about them, and you have certainly got to do it if you are going to survive at all. And they have a fine time. They know that they are right and everybody else is all wrong, and they have the coziest sol
idarity, even extending to a charming round of local jokes.

  One of the prettiest of these, I often think, is the sending of a small but admirably made coffin to anyone whose doctor has pronounced him to be in grave danger. There is only one, which goes the rounds, and whoever gets it is in honor bound to send it back, so it can be ready for the next apt occasion. It is made of thin, black-painted wood, with a long-legged white cross on the lid, and it is decorated with little wreaths of edelweiss – for good luck – withered crisp and gray. It is an invariable wow, and is often brought into the Murphys’ bar to add to the gaieties. Mr. Benchley saw it, one night. You just ask him.

  You know, I can’t believe that jokes like the little coffin exist in American sanataria. There aren’t Americans here; they may be sent here, but they don’t stay – they prefer to get their dying over with quicker. What we have here are Germans and Swiss and South Americans and always and always British, damn them, and a few East Indians and lots of Roumanians. I think the little coffin is a fair sample of Mitteleuropean comedy. Whoopee in the Balkans: or Who Wants to Be First Worm?

  There is somewhat gentler and more intellectual whimsy in the constant reciting among the English-speaking of the phrase, “T.b., or not t.b., that is the question.” If I heard that once a day all Summer, I heard it twice. And it is always greeted with as much laughter and admiration as if it had been that moment minted. Another little beaut is the Montana slogan: “Come to Montana and choose your shroud.” . . . . Now you know I can’t tell you things like that; you wouldn’t believe them. Even as it is, I have to call in Mr. Benchley as witness to the little coffin.

  And you wouldn’t believe, either, some of the local characters, who are my infrequent buddies – now and then I get one of my gregarious pretties, and I would fraternize with card tricks so as not to be alone, and I bet youse guys would, too. There is the Spanish belle, invariably known as “the lady who came around,” because, though everything is all right now, there were five days of intense worry and the village hummed with suggestions of ergot and hot foot-baths and applications of mustard. There is Brita von Barnekow, called “the bad baroness,” who looks like something out of Richthofen’s circus, accepts men, women, dogs, and ducks, with equal good-humor, and has t.b. of the throat. There is the directress of the British library (an institution eight feet square) who once lived on an African farm and now has a little black, wooly-haired daughter of nine to show for it. There is the Serbian prince, aged twenty-one – he is the present holder of the little coffin – who is living in morganatic sin with a Swiss lady who can hemorrhage for you at the drop of a hat. There is the one American girl who has been here five years but keeps her South Boston accent intact, and has only one desire in life – to see a talking picture. There is the little half-Greek, half-Turkish doctor, who has the bugs himself – as all the doctors have – and replies to what I call my French with German of, I do not doubt, the same calibre, so we get along pretty. There is the little French-Swiss dressmaker who is having goings-on with an ex-attaché of the Brazilian legation in Geneva; they each have an absent spouse somewhere, but they have about four months of life between them, so what the hell. . . . . . Then I have two bed-ridden friends whom, in the interval between Mr. B.’s departure and my loss of the powers of locomotion, I used to visit dutifully, bearing flowers. One is Jack Griswold – Marc knows him – who was an official in the Guaranty Trust in Paris and is just what you would expect from that; and the other is René Crevel, a young Frenchman who wrote a book called “Mon Corps et Moi” and is just what you would expect from that.

  So I was awful glad to see Scott Fitzgerald.

  But you know, in justice to my Alpine following, I think pretty hard about Some I Could Mention, back in the Old Country – not friends, of course, but things I saw approximately as often as I see these. And I can’t give myself any argument against the fact that Bucky Buchanan, Ruth Hale, Mildred Gilman, and several gents who shall be nameless aren’t so hot or so wholesome either. It is true they aren’t actually infectious; but on the other hand, none of them speaks more than one language, if that. So I guess it about evens up in the course of a year, though a certain edge must be granted to the lung-ers, on account of their immeasurably better manners.

  It is only since Gerald’s departure and the mess of my knee that I have been staying up here at the Murphys’. They aren’t in the sanatorium where they used to be, any more – they have a châlet up the hill in Vermala, but it has no room, so I stop at a little pension down in the village of Montana. It is – well, cheerful is a big word – but it’s much better than the sanatorium, and though the other boarders are all sicks, at least they are not in those stages where they cough all night and kick lingeringly off toward morning. . . . . Count your blessings over, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done. . . . .

  I keep putting off talking about the Murphys, but I find I can’t ever come to the time when I can say what I think of them, what for crying. I just never saw anything like them – I don’t suppose anybody ever did. Maybe Mr. B. told you about little Patrick – that the specialist came out here from Paris, and the verdict was three more years here. There just isn’t anything to say, is there? They are giving him injections of gold now, which is considered the last resort, and they don’t generally do it to children. . . . Well, it’s a trick disease, and takes sudden changes for the better, often. We do quite a lot of reminding about that.

  Maybe Mr. B. told you that the Murphys started a bar – they took over a place called Harry’s, consisting of a bar, one great room, and a terrace, decorated it so that it is the most attractive place in the world, I should think, and imported a most endearing German band from Munich. People could go there for aperitifs and tea and in the evening, and was it a godsend! Of course, they lost money hand over good red herring, but they did it partly for something to do, partly to give the poor devils here a place to go, and mostly because there is a sweet little guy here who is able to be up and about but must stay on account of the climate, and they wanted to make him director, so as to give him a job – and incidentally, a salary – and some sort of interest in living. Big lice, the Murphys are. . . . By the way, another of their scurvy tricks was their announcement that Sara’s father had set apart a sum, in his will, to be distributed among their friends’ children. Well, that meant that Sara came into some extra money, and she and Gerald wanted to do something for their friends’ kids, and they thought it was a little more graceful to say it was left them specially, instead of just giving it. . . . I need scarcely say that this letter is in entire confidence, both because a lie as lovely as that should have eternal respect, and also that there is no reason for the young of the Stewarts, Barrys, MacLeishes, etc. to cease lisping up their innocent prayers for the soul of old Mr. Wiborg. But I just wanted to tell you something of what miserly, overbearing, purse-proud, ungracious, self-centered poops the Murphys are. They’re just the people who deserve terrible trouble.

  Well, anyway, the bar is closing next week, because foreign musicians can stay only three months in Switzerland and the band’s time is up. And also, though there was only a handful of people in the Summer, there is nobody at all now. From the fifteenth of September till the fifteenth of November is called the dead season – a phrase that always gets me screaming with laughter, and it would you, too, if you could see what the live season is like. God knows, the bar is but little good to me, sitting here with one leg laid stiffly on a chair in front of me, but I get a bit thoughtful about how I am going to miss it when I am able to walk, and the yips come stealing over me.

  It isn’t, I know, fair of me to be so sunk right now, because this is a time of trick circumstances. This is pretty bad – I can’t get upstairs to see Sara, and the couple of times she has staggered down to call, creaking and lime-colored, we both got to crying into our gin and bitters (neither of us, but especially Sara, is allowed by the doctor to drink, these days. I don’t q
uite understand the knee theory, but there seems to be some notion that alcohol will go right to it and inflame it. All right. So it will go right to it and inflame it.) It would be, and is, a time of hideous loneliness for me, but there are worse things than loneliness, and one of the fanciest is to be at the mercy of a bubbling little romp of eleven, just All Boy! Oh, kids, kids, have I got a bellyful of Baoth! There was some talk of his going to boarding school in Lausanne – at an institution where, I was told by an American alumnus, sodomy is included in the curriculum – but they entered him too late and the lists had closed. There is a little flurry about his going to school in Munich, to learn German, but Sara can’t quite bear the thought of his being twenty hours away. If he were twenty years away, it would be too close for me, but mother-love is, I suppose, mother-love. Also, he has the craft to be perfectly sweet to Sara, and he is, of course, a model child, under the stern eye of Dow-dow. But away from them he is a thief, a liar, a bully, a cad, and the most outrageous pest you ever saw. He is also the handsomest and doggiest-looking kid I ever set eyes on. But I find I am no longer a prey to such things. I do not know if this means that I have lost my grip or gained it.