Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

The dinner she was obliged to attend for which Mrs. Carpenter had collected two ambassadors and a slangy Duchess was the last straw. My mother had never been to such a dinner in her life, and I confess to a complete sympathy with her when she gasped out afterwards that it was incredible that she should have been preserved from such ordeals throughout her youth when she had enough energy to bear them, only to be subjected to them in her old age when she hadn’t. That dinner, with its ten courses, was the funeral feast of a relationship not yet born, but that might truly have come into being and flowered to full sweetness between the grave awkward girl in the straight white frock, and the little quivering lady whose twitching eyebrows and frightened hurried glances alone testified to her acute agony of soul. Poor Maman, poor Jane, poor Izzy. I was there. I saw, and I did not realize the full meaning. I did not realize how lasting the effect would be. I was on the contrary absurdly reassured because of Jane herself. I saw in her silence, her gravity, her perfect timid deference to my mother, a promise of future felicity. I gathered that she would never be guilty of publicly blushing for her own parent, but that she would and did appreciate mine. I was right in this, but I was wrong in believing that my mother would appreciate in her turn the tender tribute. I reckoned without her nerves, her weariness, her discouraged sense of being victimized and exposed, all the accumulations of her years of abhorrence of the thing that was now thrust upon her. She had complained so little that I had failed to understand how deeply humiliating to her were the circumstances of her son’s marriage. She considered it indisputably a mésalliance, and yet she was forced to appear to rejoice in it with indecent exhibitions of familiarity. Mrs. Carpenter not only had disregarded her request for a little family gathering but had evidently succumbed to the desire to show her to just those people who, not having yet seen her, would especially relish the sight. “Just as if, mon cher,” my mother wailed afterwards, “I were anything to look at. Fancy wanting to show me, a skimpy bundle of black clothes.” She had done violence to herself in going to that dreadful apartment in the Avenue du Bois, and the effort was too much for her. The place was too much for her. She never forgot it and, I believe she never looked at Jane without remembering those golden plates, those loud nasal voices, those large glasses full of crushed ice and green peppermint, those horrid scraping fiddles. To my mother such an evening was a souvenir to last her the rest of her days. The most she could do after that was not actively to dislike her daughter-in-law, and she seemed to achieve this by cultivating in all that concerned that young person a consistent vagueness. When people talked of Jane she only half listened and answered irrelevantly. Her phrase was always the same—“Mais oui, elle est si gentille.” When Jane herself was there she would look absent-mindedly beyond her and put her phrase in another form and murmur—“Comme vous êtes gentille.” Jane could never get any further than that. It constituted a barrier, graceful and light as gossamer, impenetrable as steel armour. All the girl’s longing to be loved and to please, all her naïve attentions, all her thoughtful plans for the older woman’s comfort, were met with the same sweet gentle vagueness. When she brought flowers, when she asked advice, when she put her motor at the other’s disposal, when she asked her to come to her, it was always—“Comme vous êtes gentille,” followed by a little plaintive sigh that the girl gradually came to understand. Even when she worked out and carried through all on her own, a scheme for adding considerably to my mother’s material ease, the formula was merely changed to “Vous êtes vraiment trop gentille” and finally when Jane’s baby was born, and she believed that at last her mother-in-law would show some warmth of feeling, the words that greeted her when she opened her eyes and saw the latter leaning over the bassinet, were—“Comme elle est gentille,” this time addressed to the slumbering infant.

I know that my mother tried to be kind to Jane, and I believe that she was never positively unkind, never at least during those first years of her marriage, but aside from the unpleasant pressure Mrs. Carpenter had brought upon her and that had given her a kind of chronic nervous depression in all that concerned Jane, there was also the fact that Jane was not the sort of person who would ever have appealed to her. My mother liked Bianca and had wanted her for a daughter-in-law; how then could she love Jane who was the antithesis of Bianca, and who by usurping Bianca’s place, so my mother put it to herself, brought the contrast constantly to her mind? I have heard my mother say that she liked people to be more interesting than they looked, and found it amusing to be with people whom she was led on by some subtle provocative charm to discover. She recognized this charm in Bianca without ever discovering the sinister meaning of it, and she felt that Jane showed too much and therefore promised too little. Jane was too big and too striking to please her. She made, to my mother’s eyes, too much of a display. My mother liked above everything “mesure.” Her favourite form of condemnation was to call a thing “exagéré.” What at bottom she cared most for in a person was their being “comme il faut.” I don’t believe that she ever went so far as to consider her daughter-in-law vulgar, but there were things about her that she would have called “outré.” If she had ever allowed herself to depart from the vague affectionate affability that she preserved so consistently and so bafflingly, she would have said, (perhaps she did say something of the kind to Claire, I know they discussed Jane between them) that there was something almost shocking in a young woman with such an ugly face having such a beautiful figure. They, Claire and Maman, would have liked the ugliness of the face better if it had not been held so high on such splendid shoulders. They would have forgiven Jane her profile if it had not been for her really marvellous hands and feet. In the same way they would have known better how to deal with the whole striking physical being if it had not gone with such shyness and such humility. What they could not make out, and found it hard to put up with, were her incongruities. Such looks should aesthetically have been combined with audacity and hardness. Instead they found on their hands a poor quaking creature of a pathetic docility who seemed to present to them on her lovely palms an exposed and visibly pulsating heart, that they didn’t know what to do with, didn’t want to touch, were positively afraid of. It seems strange, but it was nevertheless true that Jane frightened them. Her need of them exposed there quite simply to their gaze, her simple, inarticulate but all too visible desire to love them and be loved, made them turn away in a kind of flurry that was partly delicacy and partly fear. There was an intensity about her that opened dangerous and wearying vistas of emotion which they wished at all costs to avoid. Claire said to me one day—

“Mother is afraid Jane will crush her, throw herself on her, I mean, literally, and hug and squeeze her, and she doesn’t like physical contact of that sort, you know that.”

Of course I knew. We all knew. From our earliest years we had always approached Maman as it were on tiptoe, delicately, as if she were made of some precious perishable stuff that would be broken at a rude touch. Our sense of this had been for us one of her subtlest charms. When she allowed us to kiss her we did so lightly and quietly. The touch of our lips on her hair or her soft worn cheek, was the fleeting pleasure of a winged instant, yet it was a pleasure; she had a way of conveying to it a quality, a fine quick elusive meaning. We never felt that we had been cheated, on the contrary, her kisses were rare and might have been deemed meagre, but they were beautiful. There was a grace in the way she laid her hand on one’s arm and drew one down that was more than artistry; it conveyed a sense of something precious that had never been vulgarized by handling and mauling. I do not remember her ever folding any of us in her arms, and if my memory of her demonstrations is particularly acute because they were more often for Claire or for Philibert than for me, that only proves that I know what I mean and in no way diminished the beauty of what I was so often able to observe from my distance. The act of opening wide her arms would have been extraordinary in my mother. I never saw it. With Claire who was the person in the world to whom she was closest, I often noticed how delicate and restrained was her manner, and yet somehow with scarce any demonstrations of affection, they conveyed to each other an infinite tenderness. They were constantly together, they talked everything over. Claire had, I believe, no secrets from Maman. They depended on each other. Together they tasted the ineffable sweetness of almost perfect communion. And yet I never saw them cling together, I never surprised them in each other’s arms. So strangely alike, so perfectly in harmony, they reminded me sometimes of characters on the stage, two figures in some graceful pantomime who had been drilled to make the same gestures in time to the same music and who moved always through the close articulate measure of their parts in perfect unison, tracing parallel patterns in the space round them, mysteriously united yet never touching and scarcely ever looking at each other.

Such an impression I sometimes had in the old days when I still lived in the bosom of the family, and now, as a kind of moral outcast, looking back I find even more in it than I did then. I see them not so much as actors who had learned a part, but almost as hypnotized beings who, whether they wished it or not, were bound to move and act and speak in a certain way. What it all comes to, I suppose, is that they were the fine perfect products of a system that held their individualities chained. So perfectly representative of their class, of their race, of the discriminative intolerant idea of their forebears, as to have been born with a complete set of gestures and prejudices and preferences and vocal intonations all ready for them, existing in them regardless of their own volition. I see them as the slaves of a hyper-sensitive, super-subtle inheritance, and I understand that with them many things were more truly impossible than with most people. It was impossible for them to make an ugly abrupt movement. The strong occult force of their breeding controlled their limbs and gave them a kind of grace that if one watched carefully was reminiscent of heavy powdered wigs and unwieldy panniers. It was impossible for them to mingle in crowds or walk along the street or take an interest in public affairs. It was impossible for them to look at the public without scorn or subject themselves to the physical contact of poor people in crowded trains. Instinctively they manœuvred to hide themselves from the eyes of the public. It was really as if they had lived under another régime and could not quite realize this one.

How could I not understand what Claire meant when she said that Maman was afraid that Jane would crush her? Jane was no reincarnation of some spoiled beauty of another century. If she represented any one but her glorious healthy self, it was more likely a Red Indian princess or a blond Norse amazon. Jane had not learned in a previous existence how to conceal one set of feelings and delicately convey another. She did not even know that such feats were expected of her. She would learn, but it would take time. For the moment she was just obviously what she seemed, a brave ardent young thing, capable of all sorts of mistakes. She would come in with her long beautiful stride and tower over my mother and sweep down to her; to Claire it seemed like swooping not sweeping, and my mother would huddle in her chair and struggle against the inclination to shut her eyes, and then the confused, intimidated, glowing creature in the marvellous clothes of Philibert’s designing, would sit dumbly, wistfully, waiting and wanting something, anything in the way of a crumb of comfort; would watch for any sign of unstudied natural joy at her presence and would accept in its place the pleasant flow of my mother’s vague affability, and would go away humbly, to come back the next day with an offering, flowers or a book or some precious little gift, and always my mother would say—“Comme vous êtes gentille.”

And besides all this the things that Jane and Philibert did were not calculated to amuse my mother in the least. She had never cared about public shows, and had always considered the fine art of entertaining to exist in the number of people one eliminated. Philibert’s enormous parties, his balls, his dinners of a hundred couples, his fantastic “Fêtes Champêtres,” dismayed her. She thought they were Jane’s parties. It was Jane whom she held responsible for all that was spectacular in the brilliant existence of her son; it was Jane she blamed for the phenomenal marble Paris mansion. It would have been impossible to have explained to her that Jane had scarcely glanced at the plans of the house when Philibert presented them to her. She refused to go to any of their parties. Her dislike of magnificence was a part of her deep absolute view of what was “comme il faut.” Magnificence was suitable to crowned heads, and though she would not have admitted that anything was too good for her son, she did not like to see him playing at being a king, and perhaps because all her life she had cherished a loyal personal sentiment for the destitute Orleans family, taking their political mourning for her own, it filled her with horror to find her son surrounded by all the trappings of an actor monarch and scattering largesse to the rabble, in a way her impoverished, unrecognized, exiled sovereign could not do. His enormous house, which she persisted in believing to be Jane’s, depressed her. The really phenomenal harmony of its richness escaped her. The regal vistas of its apartments, all warmed and glowing and made by her son’s consummate artistry habitable left her cold. The fine tapestries, the riot of blended colour, the audacious effects of light and shadow, the profusion of precious lustrous silks and gleaming brocades, wearied her gaze. Knowing well enough, who better, good things when she saw them, there were here too many to look at. I have pathetic memories of her shrunken black figure tripping through those immense chambers on Philibert’s arm. I see her pass with little pattering steps across the endless expanse of polished floor, her lorgnon to her eyes, her head turning this way and that with quick bird-like movements, pretending to look at everything while refusing to see anything at all. The size of the place oppressed her and made her suspicious. She could not believe that such enormous rooms could be full of fine little treasures. Her experience told her that fine pieces were rare and were kept under glass, and were not to be bought, save at a price. Even Jane’s fortune, which she had been so often made to feel was too much for good taste, could not in her opinion have filled that house with genuine things. Her son had been led astray. He was guilty of imitation. If he took her straight up to a gem of a cabinet and made her scrutinize it, well, she admitted its existence, but what was one cabinet in a room where there were twenty? She was in her way incorrigible. She did not believe in miracles, and while the rest of Paris was gaping it only made her feel dreadfully tired to be so put upon. That was her real feeling about the gigantic mansion. It made her feel tired. She was obliged to take the grand staircase slowly and stop on each landing. With her hand on the polished marble balustrade she toiled up it panting, gently catching her breath in the presence of mocking marble fauns and disdainful goddesses. Dear little fragile figure, growing smaller and more bent with time in her unmodish garments and simple black bonnet, fine proud gentle lady, I believe in the bottom of her heart she was sometimes afraid one of the army of constantly changing footmen would mistake her identity and show her to the housekeeper’s room. It was the sort of thing she would have taken as a horrid joke with a dreadful moral.

I find that I am taking a vast deal of trouble and time in explaining my own family, and seem to be getting absolutely no nearer my goal, that is the heart of Jane’s own problem. And yet I am sure it was all a part of it. In going into my mother’s feelings in such detail, I do so because of what happened later, and I sometimes wonder whether perhaps my mother foresaw what was going to happen and knowing whichever way it turned out that she was going to take Philibert’s part, made up her mind at the outset that it would all be much simpler if she never gave Jane any encouragement to expect anything else. Her attitude of increasing aloofness as time went on becomes more explicable if one interprets it as an anticipation of trouble. Heaven knows trouble was obvious enough to anybody who was interested. Weren’t there bets on at the club as to how long Philibert would stand it, that is, his enforced conjugal felicity? And other bets as to how long it would take his wife to find out certain things that every one else knew? It required no special prophetic gift to foresee that some day something was bound to happen, and I am sure my mother foresaw it. But I am a little puzzled as to why Philibert himself chose to make matters worse by keeping his wife and mother estranged, for I am perfectly sure that if Philibert had wanted my mother to love Jane, she would have done it, simply because she always did what he asked her. And again, if Maman had brought herself to care for Jane, she would have influenced her and guided her; she might even have prevented her from precipitating a crisis. One would have thought Philibert would have availed himself of such aid. But no, that was not his idea. His idea was quite other. He wanted his mother to dislike his wife for reasons of his own, or, at any rate, he did not want any understanding intimacy to exist between the two. On the other hand he asked Claire to make friends with her and help him with her education. And he seemed content that Jane and Bianca should be friends. Was this because he knew Claire would never care for Jane, however much she saw of her, and was afraid my mother might? I don’t know, I am not sure. There are aspects of the case that grow more obscure the more I think of them.

As for Bianca—and Jane—that I learned about afterwards.