A Woman Lawrence Knew

A STORY

by LEWIS GELFAN

SOONER or later something would change, but it was a question of how long one could continue like this. It was humiliating to think of the dozen chambermaids, not to speak of the clerks, the waiters, and the two chefs, all on full salary— and the hotel empty, except for the American lady, one negligible guest. The maids had nothing to do but gossip, the clerks had developed a technique of sleeping with an attentive expression on their face, and the waiters sat in the kitchen all day drinking coffee and, he supposed, stuffing themselves with pasta. At that rate they would soon be bursting out of their serving jackets and require new ones.

But the two chefs were the real problem. It he told Bonsard, his head chef from Flims, that he was closing the hotel for a month, perhaps until the first of April, Bonsard like any Frenchman would take the first train to Paris and disappear, perhaps for good. On the other hand, if it went on like this, with nothing to do in the kitchen but argue, and Bonsard spending hour after hour explaining to the second chef, Carozzi, the inferiority of Italian cooks, the mediocrity of Italian wine, the insipidity of Italian women and the impotence of Italian men, compared with the French, it might end with their having to bury him, also for good.

Carozzi, a Sicilian, lacked imagination as a chef, but to see him handle his knives was poetry. When he could no longer bear to listen to Bonsard he went quietly to the meat table and sharpened his knives. He ground each blade to a fineness that, as the waiters who sat eating pasta said, would serve to shave the beard of an angel. Carozzi addressed his knives by name endearingly, restraining them with an effort as they quivered in his hand, each begging permission to carve up what he called the French pork. But his restraint would not last forever.

No, it could not continue. Rain every day since the beginning of the month, desolating, not half a dozen tourists to be found in a resort with two dozen hotels. Only the luxury class Villa Grecia could afford to keep on all its help, with their ridiculous uniforms of pseudo-Greek tunics, and the two doormen who stood, hoplite shield in arm, against the pseudo-Doric columns at the entrance to the hotel. He could not afford to remain open simply because the Villa Grecia did. They were not in the same category; his was, quite exactly, a first-class hotel, a Swiss hotel. He catered to what he called the solid class of tourists, those who traveled regularly and spent freely but expected something for their money. Only people who didn’t know what to do with their money went to lus hotels, where that problem was quickly settled. The Villa Grecia. Americans went there out of ignorance, and wealthy Italians out of pride; but they were no loss to him, that trade. He never believed in attracting a clientele which could not afford the rates: they stayed only a short time, skimped on their meals and drinks or bought them elsewhere. It was the same in Switzerland, worse after the war, with so many people who did not know what to do with their money: they were bad for the hotel business.

Still, he had been a fool to sell out, to come to Sicily and buy an interest in the Swizzero. He thought of the old Flimserhof, in February, the log fires in the hearths, skiers tramping in and out all day, whistling and singing, the bar packed, people standing shoulder to shoulder, clinking glasses of hot rum and mulled wine. . . .

That was enough. He would close the hotel, all except the bar, as soon as the American lady left. She had only come yesterday, but there was nothing for her to do here, in the rain; she looked miserable. At the first opportunity he would remind her that the airport autobus left at six o’clock.

He walked down the corridor past the open door of the bar, saw the American lady was still inside, and went on into the reception room. The carved Swiss clock (he had brought it from Zurich, wanting his guests to have that sense of security that comes with having a reliable timepiece in the establishment) struck three. He went to the door and looked out. A soggy, wet mass of sky, sirocco weather — there was no predicting what it would do.

The high season in Sicily. It was impossible. He could imagine nothing more useless to the hotel business than rain. Snow or ice one could manage, but rain was impossible. Rain invariably made the guests feel they were being cheated, and nothing one could provide by way of indoor amusement made any difference; they would write letters the first afternoon, and perhaps the second, but on the third they would pack.

2

THE quarter hour struck. Less than three hours now before the airport bus would leave. Providing the American lady was on it, he could give the staff notice tonight, and by the end of the week be able to catch the Rome Express for Zurich. If the American lady did not leave — no, that would be stupid.

He decided to give her a push. A very small push, but a push. It went sharply against his instincts, to turn out a guest, but a look at the rows of empty mailboxes over the reception desk and another look at the weather subdued his instincts. He snapped his fingers at the glassy-eyed clerk, standing like a wax figure behind the desk.

“Let me have that passport.”

“The American lady’s passport, Signor Bernhardt?” The clerk stirred briskly into life.

“ Who else’s?”

“Si, Signore. I shall send it to the room?”

“Just give it to me.”

“Si, Signore. Scusi.”

The American lady was sitting on a barstool, reading labels on the liquor shelf above the long mirror. There was no one else in the bar except Carlo the bartender, who was trying to bring in a clear station over the static on the radio, and the boy Janni, his helper, who was studying a book of English lessons while he polished glasses. Bernhardt walked in smiling and laid the passport on the bar.

“I beg your pardon, but you will want this back, of course.”

“Oh, do I need it now?”

“Not actually, Madame. Simply a precaution, so that you have it when you depart. Occasionally the clerks are negligent.”

“It never happened to me before. Everything is different now, I suppose. I always used to stayin reliable hotels.”

Bernhardt closed his eyes for a fleeting moment while the spasm passed. He smiled. “We would in any case have forwarded it to you, Madame. I suppose you will be going on to Rome, for the 1 heater?”

“I don’t know. I never know where I’m going next. I came here to see the almond blossoms, but you have all this rain. When is it going to stop?”

Bernhardt shrugged with a long, slow lift of his arms toward heaven. “In God’s own time, I am afraid.”

“You must be having a terrible season.”

“Oh, I would hardly say that.”

“You aren’t starting very well,” the American lady said. ”I never remember so much rain here in February. My family always brought me here to sec the almond trees in bloom. We stayed at the Pensione Venere and had a wonderful time.”

“1 am told one is very comfortable there.” (If one could put up with broken bedsprings, damp sheets, and a second-rate kitchen, he murmured to himself.)

“It wasn’t to save money. Mother never eared about that. But it’s more fun in a pensione, don’t you think? So many people. You meet reallydistinguished people there, too. When I found the Venere was closed I almost went right away. But I suppose I shouldn’t go without seeing the almond blossoms.”

Bernhardt tapped thoughtfully on the American lady’s passport, edging it toward her. “I could easily send out someone to cut a sprig for you.”

“Oh, no. I want to see them on the trees. I want to walk under the trees and smell them and have the blossoms drop into my hair.”

He glanced automatically at her hair: it was a colorless brown, probably dyed, he thought, and propped up in a shapeless fluff over her forehead. Almond blossoms in that hair. He closed his eyes again and shuddered, remembering the coiffures that had paraded through his foyer in the Flimserhof. Smiling at the American lady he said, “At this moment the rain is really very slight. You might be refreshed by a small promenade. It is merely ten minutes’ walk to the hillside.”

The American lady revolved slowly about on the barstool. “I don’t think I ought to go out. I might catch cold. I hate to lie in bed in a hotel room. It makes me cry.”

She seemed on the point of giving a demonstration. Bernhardt begged her pardon and withdrew. The boy Janni, who had raised his voice in order to hear himself over the others’ conversation, was saying his lessons (in rhyme for easy remembering): —

“...Good ev-venning Mis-ter Smith. You are loo-king ver-ry fine. We have Eng-gel-ish cig-arrettes. Here is the key to num-ber nine. . . .”

3

CARLO the bartender had dialed in a ragged Italian band playing American jazz. “Isn’t there any Italian music you can get?" the American lady said. “Jazz makes me nervous.”

Carlo abandoned the radio and came back behind the bar. “It is the weather,” he said. “The sirocco.

It is bad for the nerves.’

“ Yes, I know. When is it going to stop?”

“We must have first the change of moon. Then it will make good weather.

“I thought God made the weather. Don’t you people believe in God?”

Carlo tapped the crucifix under his white shirt front and said patiently, “God is for the spirit, for the weather we have the moon.”

The American lady lowered her eyes to the level of the long mirror behind Carlo. “What do you have for the heart ?” she sighed.

“Dry Martini. Molto secco.” He exhibited the vermouth bottle in one hand and the gin in the other.

“I don’t think I want anything to drink now. I’ll smoke a cigarette.”

Carlo replaced the bottles under the bar and clucked his tongue. “Janni!”

Janni dropped his book and hurried over with a match. He held it up before the sulphur had burned off, and the smell made the American lady cough. Carlo’s left hand circled deliberately, as though stalking a fly, crashed against Janni’s ear and dropped him out of sight. The American lady gasped. She sucked on her cigarette nervously as Carlo bent toward her, smiling, his mustached lip curled over strong white teeth. He held up his lighter.

“Grazie molto.”

“ Prego.”

Janni popped up with a red, swelling ear and a clean ash tray. Carlo nodded and strolled down the length of the bar, fingering its polished surface while the boy watched with an expressionless face. Carlo wiped his finger on a towel, nodded again, and walked out into the hall, humming while he lighted the stump of a cigar he had in his pocket.

Bernhardt came pacing by and stopped, cocking an eyebrow in the direction of the American lady.

“Still inside?”

“ Yes, Signore. Drinking, no. Sitting. Since the colazione she sits.”

“Has she said anything more about leaving?”

“No, Signore. To me it is a matter of indifference. She is only for reading labels, not for drinking.

Bernhardt spread his palms helplessly and murmured something about the Americans.

Carlo agreed. When it came to a drinking clientele, he would have the English, or the Norwegians. These did not come into the bar to read labels or invent conversation. These drank. A long, steady pull, like a horse from a bucket, beautiful to watch. For the Americans a drink was something to be sat on, to be hatched. It was a sin, he said, that the only party of English in town were stopping at the Bell’Aurora. But perhaps they would come into the bar tonight for drinking. . . .

“Carlo, if she speaks of the autobus for the airport, mention the departure is at six.”

“Yes, Signore.”

Carlo severed the ash from his cigar, replaced it in his pocket, and came back into the bar. In the ash tray in front of the American lady a dead cigarette reposed, a smear of carmine on the tip.

“Janni! ”

Janni scurried over and exchanged the ash tray for a clean one. His ear was still red and looked twice as large as the good one.

“Grazie, Janni,” the American lady said.

“Do not mention it—please.”

“Parli bene inglese, Janni! Speak some more English.”

Janni stared at her, groping for a phrase. He had a shy serious face with intense black eyes and the mouth of an angel by Raphael; the American lady stared back at him with a hungry expression. Janni ducked away and went back to his book, both ears glowing.

The American lady sighed. “Why doesn’t he go to school to learn English?" she asked Carlo.

“He is learning to attend the bar. This he will not learn in school.”

“But he’s so young. He can’t be more than twelve.”

“He has fifteen years,” Carlo said.

“Fifteen! He doesn’t look that old at all. You can’t tell anything by looks, I suppose.”

She held out her passport. “ How long ago would you say I had this picture taken?”

Carlo, who had been chopping ice, wiped his hands and took up the passport. The photograph was of a young woman with bold, laughing eyes, like a dancing faun. Thirty years, he thought, flicking a glance at the rouge and powder restoration on the other side of the bar. If not thirty-five. He shrugged.

“How long?” the American lady insisted.

“I would say perhaps before the war.”

“Just before the war. Oh my, ten years ago. I was twenty-six then, but you wouldn’t think it, would you?”

Carlo, who read her age in the passport as fortyseven, agreed that one required some imagination.

“I should have had a new picture taken,” she said, “but my husband liked this one so much. It was taken in Vienna, just before the war. So lovely in Vienna, so gay. We were married in a country church with a large bougainvillea vine over the door. Do you like bougainvillea?”

Carlo said it was close to Ins heart, He laid down the passport and went to stand at the terrace windows, watching the slow rain. He was a man of even temper, ordinarily unaffected by the weather, since he had no interests or obligations outside the bar, where brightness and warmth and song were all under his control at the turn of a switch. But today there was a gloomy dampness inside which even the long fluorescent tubes, the polished walnut and tinted mirrors, could not dispel. The American lady, Carlo thought. Since the colazione, sitting there licking her belly like a sick cat, blood of the God!

“Have you ever been in Vienna?”

Carlo came back behind the bar and took up the ice hammer. No, he said, beating the ice viciously into fragments. No, he was not for traveling. He had been to Rome twice and in northern Italy once when he made his military service, but he did not think there was much to see outside of Sicily.

“Vienna was beautiful. I wish I was in Vienna now.”

Carlo flashed a smile with all his strong teeth and said that he understood it was only a matter of hours from Home. At six o’clock there was a bus —

“No, I couldn’t go back now. Not without my husband.”

Could not the husband be persuaded to join her in Vienna?

“Oh, no. My husband’s dead. Dead in the war.”

It was triste, Carlo said, gathering up his ice, what the war did.

“It’s so stupid. He was to meet me in New York, but then America went in the war and he was called an enemy alien. The most charming, cultured man you ever met, an architect — everyone, adored him. He was killed by the bombs.”

“Ah, the bombs.”

“I wish we had never gone in the war. All that killing, it hasn’t made any difference in the world. Has it?”

Carlo admitted that the world appeared to him little changed except that everything cost more and was worth less. He filled the ice bucket and set it down under the bar. The radio began to throb out a Neapolitan love song.

“. . . Cateri, Cateri, pecche me dice sti parole amar-ree....”

“What is that song?” the American lady said.

“Core ‘Ngrato. Canzione Napoletana.”

“I know, but what’s it about? I can’t make out the words.”

Carlo curled his mustache cynically and bent his head to listen. He said, “It is a question of the heart. The cruel heart which takes away the life from the other. Then it is all finished, with ihis one.”He shook his head. “ There is nothing with the words. It is only to hear the music.” He remained leaning against the bar, humming to himself.

When he looked up the American lady was crying. Carlo started for the radio but she said thickly, “Don’t shut it off. It’s beautiful.”

He let it alone, but went to stand at the far end of the bar. The Swiss clock in the reception room struck on the quarter hours and Bernhardt patrolled the corridor, looking in occasionally at Carlo, who shook his head.

4

AT fixe o’clock the English party came in. They were five, two men with two women, who looked to be in their thirties, and a man with white hair and a Malacca stick, who looked several generations removed. The old man stamped in at the head of the party, indicated with his stick the table and the chairs they were to take, and issued a command to the bar.

“Martinis, Carlo! Subito! We’ve been out five minutes in this lovely weather of yours and we’re damp to the bone.”

“Benissimo, Signor Tuppen.”

Janni raced over to light cigarettes and strew the table with ash trays and plates of salted nuts. Mr. Tuppen rapped him playfully with his stick and said in Italian that he was getting big enough to be hanged soon. The others all made jokes about the fine weather they were missing in England and began to talk about the election. Mr. Tuppen reined the conversation sharply back to Sicily. He had been coming to the island every season for fortytwo years, and was a tireless raconteur. Martinis flowed steadily from the bar to the table and were consumed along with the salted nuts and the Tuppen anecdotes, somewhat spiced. Carlo decided that the evening was beginning to promise.

The American lady had turned around on her barstool and was listening to the conversation at the table. She laughed when the others did and followed Tuppen’s stories with undissembled interest, but none of the English paid any attention to her. Once when she laughed too shrilly and too long, Tuppen pivoted his venerable white head and examined her briefly with a pained expression, but said nothing.

Someone asked if it was true that Lawrence had lived here in the early twenties. Tuppen said it decidedly was, that D. H. had come shortly after the war. Everyone began to ask about Lawrence, how he behaved toward women, how many he lived with at one time, whether he was really such a peculiar fellow. Tuppen said it was one of the three great misfortunes of his life (the other two being that he had been horn too late to see the Queen’s jubilee and had lived long enough to see the Labor crowd get in) that he had not known Lawrence. He had seen him about once or twice and had heard a great deal of talk, mostly rubbish. They had made Lawrence into something of a god in Sicily, so of course the poor chap had to go in hiding.

Tuppen shifted the conversation to other great names he had known intimately in Sicily, but one of the women asked again about Lawrence, and Tuppen repeated, with a touch of exasperation, that he had not known the man.

“I knew Lawrence.”

This time everyone turned around and looked at the American lady. Tuppen gave her a glance of frank incredulity and rapped with his stick for Janni.

“He was the most charming, cultured man I’ve ever met.”

The woman who had asked about Lawrence, feeling herself directly addressed, said, “ How nice.

Tuppen told Janni to bring another round of the same. The American lady slid off her stool and stopped Janni as he was going back to the bar.

“I believe I’ll have a Martini too.”

Janni, who understood only a part of what she said, immediately placed a chair for her at the table with the English. She hesitated awkwardly while the English all looked at Tuppen, who sat like a block of stone. Finally one of the younger men jumped up and said, “Have your drink with us, by all means,”

The American lady said that she really couldn’t, and plopped into the chair. The Englishman presented their names, which she immediately forgot, except that he was Carnes or Barnes or something like that. She said, flushed and excited, “Mr. Lawrence had the villa just above ours, and we used to see him often. I was just a child of course, a young girl. . . . I was studying music in Paris and my family brought me down for the summer season. . .”

Tuppen commented, to his fingernails, that the season in Sicily had always commenced in February.

“. . . Mr. Lawrence was fond of the piano and liked to hear me play. He used to say that he and I were the only two foreigners who did any work here. Sometimes he would come strolling by the window as I was playing, and he’d say ‘Mind?’ and he’d hop right over the sill, into the room. And he’d sit there, not saying a word, with his pipe or his book, perfectly still, like a sweet little boy. . . .”

Tuppen thrust in the observation that sweet little boys did not, as a rule, smoke pipes; but no one heard him. The others clamored for more intimate details about the great man.

“...I’d look up finally and he’d be gone. Perhaps he’d leave the wild flowers he’d been gathering on the sill. He loved asphodels, you know.”

Asphodels, Tuppen informed them kindly, was a lovely name for a weedy herb which no one in his senses ever gathered. He was asked to please hush.

“. . . such an unusual man. He never spoke much, but he had a look — oh, such a look. As if he knew — he knew, and oh, how it hurt.”

Someone asked if it were true that Lawrence was afraid of people.

“Oh, not at all. I often saw him at parties. The season was so gay then, so brilliant, parties everywhere. You can’t imagine how it’s all changed.”

The others commented gloomily on the changing times. They regarded the American lady enviously as one who had known the last of the best.

Carnes (or Barnes) asked if D. H. had really been an untidy chap, shaggy hair and that business.

“Oh my, no. Mr. Lawrence didn’t like formal dress particularly, but he was always extremely presentable, clean-shaven, neat —”

Tuppen raised himself halfway across the table and said, in a savage whisper, “He was what?”

“I merely said Mr. Lawrence was extremely presentable —”

“And clean-shaven?”

“Why, yes. Of course. Why do you ask?”

Tuppen’s eyes gleamed delightedly as he sank back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. He said, pounding out each syllable as though he were nailing an enemy to a cross: —

“D. H. Lawrence wore a full, red beard.”

Someone else murmured he thought Lawrence did have a beard in the twenties. They all looked at the American lady.

“A beard?” she said.

“ Hair on the chin. If Whiskers”

“It’s funny. I don’t remember that.”

“A full, red beard. Once you saw it, you never forgot it.”

“ I think you’re mistaken,” she laughed.

“I know I’m not. I’ll prove it.” He got up from the table grimly and headed for the door. One of the men called after him not to bother, that it wasn’t important, but Tuppen disappeared shouting for Monsieur Bernhardt. He came back in a few minutes and silently deposited a book on the table, open to a large signed photograph dated 1920.

The English party drained their glasses thoughtfully and consulted watches.

“Janni,” Tuppen snapped, “il conto.”

“ Why don’t we all have one more,” the American lady said. “ Let me buy you all a drink.”

The English, struggling into coats and overshoes, said their waiter at the hotel turned into a perfect beast if they were ten minutes late for supper. They shook hands quickly and Tuppen led them off. Monsieur Bernhardt, who had come into the bar in time to witness Tuppen’s triumph, now summoned all his strength for a final effort. He mentioned that if Madame desired to detain the airport bus, it was just possible to do so.

But the American lady, not hearing what he said, rose and drifted back to her stool at the bar. She took a piece of ice from the pail and sat there swirling it round and round in her glass, letting it drop and swirling it up again while Carlo looked on, fascinated, the ice hammer gripped in his hand.