Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

“Yes,” Vinnie prompts. An awful unfocused uneasiness has come over her. “You’re visiting your father in South Leigh?”

“Yeh-No-Oh gee, excuse me. I guess maybe-Oh, I’m so stupid-” To Vinnie, everything seems to be falling apart: Barbie Mumpson’s grasp of the English language has failed, and the room is full of darkness. “I thought maybe Professor Gilson told you. Dad, uh-Dad passed on last Friday.”

“Oh, my God.”

“See, that’s why I’m here.” Barbie goes on talking, but only a phrase here and there gets through to Vinnie. “So the next day… couldn’t get a seat on the plane till… Mom decided.”

“I’m so sorry,” she finally manages to say.

“Thanks. I’m sorry to have to tell you.” Barbie’s voice has become even more wavery; Vinnie can hear her clearing her throat at the other end of the line. “Anyhow, why I was calling,” she says finally. “There’s this old antique picture Dad had, and Professor Gilson says he wanted you to have it if anything happened to him-I mean Dad did. He was planning to give it to you anyhow, because you helped him so much with the research on his family, Professor Gilson says. So the thing is, I’ll be in London day after tomorrow, on my way home. I thought maybe I could bring you the picture then. If it was convenient.”

“Yes. Of course,” Vinnie hears herself reply.

“When should I come?”

“I don’t know.” She feels incapable of making any plans, almost of speech. “When would you like to come?”

“I d’know. Anytime. I’m free all day.”

“All right.” With what feels like a major effort Vinnie gathers her wits. “Why don’t you come about four. Come to tea.” From a distance, she hears her own voice, sounding horribly normal, giving Barbie Mumpson her address and directions.

Vinnie hangs up, but she is unable to let go of the phone. As she stands in the bedroom holding it and staring out through the gray gauze curtains into a blurred street full of rain, a frightful image comes to her: the image of a smashed rented car on a muddy country road, of the death that Chuck had also imagined for himself, and even courted.

He’d said he wanted her to have some picture if anything happened to him. Because he knew something was going to happen? Because he was planning it? Or was it some awful premonition? But his daughter hadn’t said it was an accident. She’d said nothing about what happened, only that he’d “passed on.” Would she have said that if it were an accident? Because if it was an accident, or rather, not a real accident-Vinnie’s head has begun to ache horribly-it would mean Chuck didn’t want to live, that he wanted to pass on. Stupid euphemism, what you’d say of someone who’d stopped for a moment on the street to speak to you, and then-

A choking, sinking feeling comes over Vinnie, as if the rain outside were pouring into her flat and rising up the walls of her bedroom. But all the euphemisms are stupid. Passed on, passed away, kicked the bucket, gone over to the Other Side-as if Chuck had committed a foul or switched teams in some awful children’s game.

What he has done is died; he’s dead. He’s been dead-what did Barbie say-since last Friday. All these days she’s been calling him, all the days he hasn’t been calling her…

That’s why he didn’t call, Vinnie thinks. It wasn’t that he was tired of me. Joy and relief flash across her mind, followed by a greater pain than before, like the beam of a lighthouse that on a dark night first pierces the gloom, and then illuminates a frightful shipwreck. Chuck wasn’t tired of her; he was dead, is dead. There is nothing left of him but his awful family, one member of which is coming to tea the day after tomorrow. And until she gets here, Vinnie will know nothing.

When Barbie Mumpson arrives it is raining again, though less heavily. She stands dripping in Vinnie’s hall, struggling with a wet raincoat, a vulgarly flowered umbrella, and a damp cardboard portfolio tied with tapes.

“Oh gee, thanks,” she says as Vinnie relieves her of these burdens. “I’m so dumb about these things.”

“Let me.” Vinnie half closes the umbrella and sets it to dry in a corner.

“I never had an umbrella before, really. I just bought this one last week, and for days I couldn’t get it open. Now I mostly can’t get it shut. I’ll figure it out some day, hopefully.”

Barbie is large and fair and healthy looking; she has a deep tan and wears an ill-fitting wrinkled pink polo shirt with a crocodile crawling across the left breast above the heart. She is also somewhat overweight, and older than her high, childish voice had suggested on the phone-perhaps in her mid-twenties.

“Please,” Vinnie says. “Come in and sit down.”

Out of some private sense of congruity, she has provided for Barbie the lavish country-house tea she had only the day before yesterday-weeks ago, it seems now-imagined the mythical De Mompessons serving to Chuck. His daughter’s appetite, like his, is good; her manners less so. She shovels in the raspberries and cream almost greedily, pronouncing them “really yummy.”

“And what do you think of England?” asks Vinnie, who feels it would be both awkward and impolitic to move at once to her real concern.

“Aw, I don’t know.” Barbie wipes cream from a square, slightly cleft chin-a disturbing feminine version of Chuck’s. “It’s not much of a country, is it?”

Repressing her reaction, Vinnie merely shrugs.

“Kinda poky and backward, you know?”

“Some people think that.” Vinnie realizes that Barbie not only has Chuck’s large, blunt, regular features and squared-off jaw (more attractive on a man than on a young woman), but his habit of blinking slowly at the end of a question.

“I mean, everything’s so small and kinda worn-out looking.”

“I suppose it might seem so, compared to Tulsa.” Vinnie allows Barbie to run on, to run down her beloved adopted country in the usual stupid tourist way. You are rightly named, she thinks, silently christening her guest The Barbarian.

“And it’s so awful wet.”

“Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t want to start an argument; she is pacing herself, waiting for the moment when she can politely ask the question that has been repeating itself in her mind and interfering with her sleep for forty-eight hours.

“How did it happen?” she bursts out finally.

“Pardon?” The Barbarian lowers a fistful of cake, shedding crumbs. “Oh, Dad. It was his heart. He was in this town hall, see, over in the next county. He went there to look at some old records, you know.”

“Yes, he mentioned he might do that.”

“Well, it was a real hot day, and the office was on the top floor. There wasn’t any elevator; you had to walk up three long flights to get to it. Anyhow, even before the librarian could bring Dad the book he wanted, while he was just standing there by the desk waiting, he just kinda collapsed.” Barbie chews and swallows audibly, rubs one fist into her left eye, then reaches for another watercress sandwich. Crocodile tears, Vinnie thinks. “Anyhow, by the time the ambulance came and they got him to the hospital he had passed.”

“I see.” Vinnie lets out a long sigh. “It was a heart attack.”

“Yeh. That’s what the doctor said.”

What they call natural causes, Vinnie thinks. Not a deliberate or half-deliberate act, not his fault-not her fault. Maybe. But if it weren’t for her, Chuck wouldn’t have died in a provincial English records office; he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. (“If it hadn’t been for you”-she hears his voice again-“I never woulda thought of looking for my ancestor.”) But what does it matter whether he died because of her, or in spite of her? Either way he is dead. He will never enter this room again, never sit where his stupid daughter is sitting now, smiling stupidly at her.