Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

But of course it was Drusoc’s neurasthenia, not his vast powers of accommodation, which had brought him to our unlikely corner of the earth, and as the Professor and his lovely colleague unraveled the etiology of his illness to Father (whose jaw sank gradually into his clavicle, eyes straying sideward like a nervous horse’s) they constantly interrupted one another, spending most of the conversation apologizing for their interruptions.

The gist of it was this: Drusoc had apparently come to believe that every series of steps ought to end with the right foot; therefore, each morning he would have to begin the day with an extra step, in order that his pairs of steps throughout the day would add up to an uneven number. This obviously pointed to a fundamental semantical confusion, and not at all the sort of thing one would expect of a rat terrier.

“You’re certain you didn’t try to hypnotize him?” Father queried the Professor.

“I never even looked at him! I swear it. Not so much as a glance!”

Father agreed that while Drusoc’s condition was indeed intrinsically fascinating, it was not a problem he was put on earth to conquer.

But this was not all, the guests went on, tumbling over themselves. It seemed the dog also had a phobia for all plant life, every kind of grass and flower. He had no fear of any human or the wildest dog, nor the terrors of the city, and he could apparently distinguish between natural life and its representation. He would gladly curl upon the gaudiest flowered chintz, for example, but pluck a real daisy anywhere near him and he would be overcome by howling.

“If a bird should alight upon a bush, he sounds out a timorous bark of warning,” the grand lady exclaimed.

“But if a ball should roll from the pavement to the grass, he considers it a total loss,” the Professor appended, glancing at his bootlaces, which seemed to be unraveling themselves even as he spoke.

Father listened, nodded, and knocked out his pipe, spewing embers down his shirtfront, as he averred that he had never come across a case in which morbidity extended to all plant life. But then he announced that he must withdraw from the project, for even to contemplate this peculiar resistance for more than a few moments placed them all in jeopardy of mental injury. Then he suggested, somewhat drily, that we could take our drinks out on the terrace, and there on the slate pavers — the safe surface of the mineral world — introduce Drusoc to ferns and mushrooms one by one, though this fell rather flat.

Mother arose to replenish the tea, and as she vacated the sofa, the Professor, seizing the pretext to be nearer the ashtray, moved to her emptied place next to the lady, all the while expostulating, “How extraordinary, befreundeter colleague — extraordinary,” touching her once on the forearm and then on the elbow, like a basso entering an opera with his single line, signifying only the proximity of intermission.

Father had put on a saturnine but rather forced smile. My mother, with her overdeveloped sense of propriety, returned with a fresh pot, and interposing herself between the guests on the divan, held one hand of each while she poured, supplying both connection and restraint. Drusoc assumed his recumbency in the corner, and I curled up beside him in the hope that my peculiarities might likewise be subject to their scrutiny. I noticed that the lady had very large lips, crater-blue eyes, and auburn hair frizzled at the ends, like a fox backing into its lair. I wanted to lick her all over.

The Professor was more affectionate with us than I had ever seen him, telling jokes, gesticulating broadly, as engaging as Father was increasingly stiff and formal. Mother was not disconcerted but simply alert and curious, rather like Lidi, our prize bitch, who greeted strangers by acrobatically walking along the topmost rail of the kennel fence. Then, as Mother poured the tea, the Professor began to stretch and yawn, praising the quality of our hospitality, the featherdown coverlet under which he had passed so many nights, the infinitely wide range of pillows, the nonpareil comfort of the horsehair mattress, unavailable since the breach with Italy, and then, pulling out his watch, which was now entangled with the virgin Dresden ringlets, opined that they would never make the last steamer. “I have never felt so safe in my life as in Cannonia,” he finally sighed to his companion.

Father shot him a glance that would turn a bear. The Professor suppressed a slight blush, but it was the lady who sensed the severity of his warning. Drusoc, by now barely an epistemological fact, regarded them with one almost kindly, pale albino eye.

The lady was no natural storyteller, as we have already determined, particularly with such tension in the room. But she nevertheless launched into several anecdotes about long walks with interesting men of powerful intellect and weak nervous systems, the coloring of various lakes at different altitudes, the heat of Berlin and the chill of Dresden. I was most impressed by these descriptions of how the sunlight is focused like a flame when it suddenly appears above the rooftops of a narrow street, of savage and sudden changes of weather, of the grand shiver you experience before a roaring fire, of how one might break a saucer and throw out the cup in frustration, of how bubbles sigh in hot cereal properly prepared, and of how certain acquaintances induce a paralysis akin to the thud of an artillery shell.

But the more she talked the more it became clear we were headed for disaster, for just as the story became interesting and all her astonishing embroidery began to point to something, there suddenly occurred that hairball of a word, uttered at first with nods all around — an indecipherable phrase that was repeated quite often, but fobbed off in a way that would not only deflect the story but rob it of interest. Even a child could see that such a gratuitous gesture, harmless enough in the mouth of a gentle and sensitive woman or a surgical wordsmith like the Professor, could become a bludgeon of banality against we misera plebs . At first I thought this simply a vocabulary beyond my years, a kinderbuch of expressions abbreviated to spare me embarrassment, but as each loose anecdote was short-circuited by its interpretation in the wooden paraphrase, the dull glaze in Father’s eyes — a glance of disappointment which only appeared when the cook tried to foist old eggs upon us, or the game had not been hung long enough, causing the blood to congeal in some unspeakable cavity — legitimized my lacquered heart. The moonroom had become a den from which no tracks returned. It was like being in a strange town of countless religious denominations, and all the church bells begin to peal at noon, so while you know that it’s noon and it’s religious, you can’t tell one bell, one church, or one religion from the other.

“Well, it’s a question of the uck , of course,” the wondrous lady pronounced.

“Quite. The very sort of uck that Blederhorst denies,” the Professor confirmed.

“He’s on to something,” she allowed, “but his is simply not a quality mind. The uck in his case is. .”

“Primordial, yet annulled,” the Professor interjected.

“Exactly,” she confirmed.

The blue cords in Father’s neck now appeared in his temples, and tiny diagonal bolts of lightning flickered across his forehead.

“Wouldn’t you like to see the tobacco leaves hung up in the barn to dry?” he said plaintively. “Or watch the livestock choke on sunflowers? Just tell me, what would amuse you most?” And at this point of desperation, Father performed his famous conjurer’s trick, throwing two half-shuffled packs of cards into a top hat, then withdrawing one in its original order and the other fully shuffled. Our guests barely acknowledged this, though Drusoc cocked a limp ear.