The Theoretical Foot Read online

  The Theoretical Foot

  Copyright © 2016 by The Literary Trust u/w/o M.F.K. Fisher

  Afterword copyright © 2016 by Jane Vandenburgh

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fisher, M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908-1992.

  Title: The theoretical foot / M. F. K. Fisher.

  Description: Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016. | “2015

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015036016

  Subjects: LCSH: Americans--Europe--Fiction. | Voyages and travels--Fiction. | Man-woman relationships--Fiction. | Europe--Social life and custums--1918-1945--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3511.I7428 T48 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036016

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-755-8

  All characters and places in this story are fictious, except perhaps Geneva, Switzerland.

  [Handwritten notation: “1988”]

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter i

  Chapter ii

  Chapter iii

  Chapter iv

  Chapter v

  Chapter vi

  Chapter vii

  Part 2

  Chapter i

  Chapter ii

  Chapter iii

  Part 3

  Chapter i

  Chapter ii

  Chapter iii

  Chapter iv

  Chapter v

  Chapter vi

  Chapter vii

  Chapter viii

  Chapter ix

  Part 4

  Chapter i

  Chapter ii

  Chapter iii

  Chapter iv

  Chapter v

  Chapter vi

  Chapter vii

  Chapter viii

  Chapter ix

  Part 5

  Chapter i

  Chapter ii

  Chapter iii

  Chapter iv

  Chapter v

  Chapter vi

  Chapter vii

  Chapter viii

  Chapter ix

  Chapter x

  Part 6

  Too Terrible to Bear

  1

  He ran quickly up the stairs. At the first landing he stopped and waited with a strange expression on his fine goat-like face while his left leg seemed to yawn, as if it were breathless.

  He leaned his forehead against the cool plastered wall, and while he reached with one hand to turn off the lights, he felt the breath come back to his leg. He waited a moment longer then stepped lightly, making his way upward to his high room. His feet knew every crack and led him willy-nilly to his love. But when he found the large bed empty and heard a quiet singing and the sound of water in the bathroom, he was glad—his leg no longer yawned, but now hurt like a cramp, like hollowed-out muscles. He lay down along one side of the bed.

  A minute later he began to moan, to his own embarrassment. The woman came out, with water shining in the hair around her face, and looked stolidly at him, her heart leaping like a wounded rabbit against her ribs.

  In five more minutes he was near insanity. He made strange barking noises and pulled at his hair until it stiffened with his pulling and his sweat into fantastic points above his incredibly tortured face.

  A doctor came, and a nurse, and he thrust his bared arms at them as a thirsty animal thrusts forth its tongue for water. Oaoh oaoooh, he jabbered when they pressed the needles into him. More, more, he said. They could not keep ahead of the pain, though. It raced opiates and won, and all night long he howled and tore at himself, slippery with sweat, pinned to the wide bed of love by a leg that had turned cold and pure in color, a peg with five toes, shapely and hideous like a Greek carving in a glacier. Oaoh, oaoh, he clattered and held out his straining arms. There, there, more! He pointed wildly at the soft veins to show them where his blood thirsted for the opiate strong enough to slake the pain. But there was none and in his agony he forgot the needles that had been emptied there and was now filled with a cruel certainty that no earthly thing could succor him. He hated the doctor, and the monkish nurse, and the pinched flat face of his beloved, and he now knew he was alone.

  i

  On the morning of August 31, Susan Harper stood looking at herself in the murky mirror of a third-class station hotel in Veytaux, Switzerland.

  It must be hitchhiking from Munich that didn’t agree with her—she’d been so well all summer and she knew she’d looked well too. But now her head ached and her eyes hurt and she was convinced that she looked not just awful, but awful.

  She pulled irritably at her smooth bleached hair and rolled it into a hard little knot on the top of her head. It was now so white and faded, her face looked dark as a Mediterranean. Her gray eyes, in contrast, seemed almost colorless now within their rings of thick black lashes as they stared out from under the startling black wings of her brows, undoubtedly her best feature. Eyes and brows? She never hesitated to use them, with outrageous infinitesimal winks and candid stares, but this morning everything about her looked flat and dull.

  She sniffed as she stood peering coldly at herself. Who could look decent after four days on the road? She stuck a tiny green bow in the hollow of her washerwoman’s knot and sniffed again.

  Well, what shall I wear, then? she asked silently. Which gown from my extensive wardrobe? What would the famous Sara Porter appreciate? What’s correct for a girl to wear to a Swiss casino at ten thirty in the morning, coming to see an older woman known as much for her smooth chic as for her snobbishness?

  How could I—how could anyone—keep up her self-respect after three months of tramping over Europe with nothing more than a collapsible zipper bag for luggage? A bag that for years had been just big enough to carry her father’s dirty slipovers and stockings home from the golf club every Saturday night? She was startled now to have thought of Father and of his pleasantly high-balled breath when he came in from a good game, how he’d then solemnly split his winnings with her.

  What would Father think if he knew where she was now?

  My green tweed skirt, she decided. Oh, that, by all means, since it is the only skirt I have. And my yellow sweater instead of the white, or shall I wear both at once to show her I really do have two? And my yellow socks instead of the white. I’ll be a vision, but a vision!

  It was all Joe Kelly’s fault, of course, giving our last cent almost to every pathetic refugee who looks at us! And what good does it really do? No country wants its poor; there were such vast numbers of refugees suddenly and it occurred to Sue that helping them was only keeping them alive and this meant they’d live on longer in abject misery.

  Then she, of course, instantly felt ashamed of herself for thinking such a thing, but her exasperation was again mounting as she looked at Joe Kelly. He was lying in bed on his back, his great hairy body spread-eagled; his heavy han
d lolled darkly toward her. Still asleep! she thought. Still taking up the whole bed as he did even when she was in it.

  Though she didn’t need the light over the washstand to dress, she snapped it on in a vicious way, thinking, Well, maybe this will wake him.

  Joe stirred, sighed once, murmurred Sweet Sue and was asleep again.

  Susan watched him with her mouth pinched tightly against her fine, large white teeth. Suddenly all her crossness vanished and she was filled with such great tenderness and yearning for Joe, seeing his unprotected infant face as he lay there, that she felt almost dizzy, almost ill at ease, to have this great coarse and ultimately so mysterious man completely in her power, to have him lying there so innocently, as defenseless before her as a snail without its shell.

  She leaned against the cool enamel basin—the cold burned into the soft flesh of her abdomen until she forgot about and now thought of how much she loved him. She wanted to draw him into her arms, to enfold him forever with her passion. Could she? Would she be able to stay with him? What if her boat back to the States should sail without her? What if she should simply appear, show up having followed Joe to Oxford? Then he would have to keep her with him! It wouldn’t be decent of her to force him, and anyway—she clenched her teeth as the question arose in her brain—did he really want her?

  She sniffed, shook her head to clear it. There is no use going over all this again and again. It had been decided, hadn’t it? Maybe Sara Porter could help her. She was older. She’d done a lot.

  Sue scowled at herself in the cheap wavy glass. Her nose dripped. She sniffed again.

  Her white net panties were finally dry, thank God. Of course, there was the extra pair, pale green, rolled up like a stocking in the pocket of her father’s golf bag. But for so long now she had washed the white ones every night in the sink of the next of their cheap hotels and hostels—she’d washed them out in a brook one time. She’d hung them up and would find them dry the next morning. Now it had become almost a point of honor to keep the green ones fresh, as if getting down to her last panties would be admitting that this strange life of theirs had become too hard.

  She shook the panties out with one deft quiet flap, then stepped into them.

  Sue was so small that even when she stood on tiptoes the mirror showed only her head and neck. She padded barefoot into the center of the room looking down at her thin and tiny panties, little more to them than a G-string, she thought with a great degree of complacency. The fabric shone white against her dark brown body.

  How beautiful! she thought, to be so brown! Even the midsummer fog and mizzle of these last ten days in Germany had not faded her and she was glad. She felt again, as she looked down at herself, the steady, exhausting, exciting heat of those forty days with Joe on the beach near Cros-de-Tallas-Cagnes and the cool voluptuous water that slipped up over her body like milk. Perhaps now she’d never fade. Perhaps this satin darkness was as permanent as the other changes that had come over her.

  She smiled, thinking of the envy of her school friends, of all the girls in her sorority house, when she showed them how brown she was. And she’s dark all over too! Sue could hear their squeals.

  But no, of course she couldn’t show them as she wouldn’t be in college at all this coming winter. Joe said he wanted her with him in England this year. He’d swore to it. Would she have to go back home?

  She shook her head again, as if to doggedly clear it, then looked down at her thin brown body. She really was too thin now. She’d stood on a peasant market-woman’s scales in Berne the day before: forty-one kilos, under a hundred pounds.

  But she wasn’t hungry anymore. It seemed to her that they’d been eating nothing but cheap sausages and heavy cheeses and thick, mud-colored bread for longer than she could remember. Joe was always glad to eat her portion or give part to the quiet refugee child, starving and half hidden in some dark Munich alley.

  Their eyes haunted her.

  Suddenly she brightened. Yes, it was true then, that making love made your breasts fuller. She peered downward. Yes, there was no doubt about it, her two little warm brown breasts were definitely rounder. She cupped her hands over them delightedly—they were firm as apples.

  “Come here, self-worshiper,” Joe said. “You’re my own particular and peculiar little pervert.”

  At the soft sound of Joe’s voice from the bed, she stared foolishly. His eyes, half-closed with sleep, gleamed in the light she now turned on.

  “Your master speaks,” he said. “Come here, woman!”

  She pulled her hands away from the warm places where they’d rested and walked quickly toward the enormous armoire where her one skirt hung primly in the darkness next to Joe’s hung-up slacks.

  “No,” Sue told him.

  Joe’s smile spread from his eyes to his mouth and he whispered almost menacingly: “Shall I have to make you, then?” He then shook one foot free from the covers as if to get up.

  “No, no, don’t,” Sue said. Though she felt deliciously nervous she made her voice sound cool and sensible. “It’s late. You know we told Mrs. Porter we’d meet her at the casino at ten thirty and it’s almost ten now. And you still have to shave.”

  “Come here,” he said again.

  She moved almost timidly toward him. He stretched out one arm, dark with black hair and sunburn, drawing her into its curve. She sat stiffly on the edge of the bed, scowling at him from under her wide, thick, dark brows.

  He drew his other hand, warm and limp with sleep, from beneath the covers and watched as he seriously cupped one large hand under both breasts, having room to spare. Then he squinted at her as Sue burst into an unwilling laugh, throwing herself across his enormous chest.

  “Oh, Joe! Joe!” she cried. “You’re so damned big!”

  “The better to love you with, my dear.”

  “No,” she said, “we can’t. There’s your Mrs. Porter?”

  “My Mrs. Porter?” Joe asked. “Are you jealous of her? Sara’s the—why, you little fool—I’ve known Sara—oh, Sue, sweet Sue, my lady, my tiny lewd and beautiful love . . .”

  ii

  It was almost an hour later that Joe Kelly stood slapping water hard against his hastily shaven chin, then snapped off the light above the washbasin. Drying his face, he turned to look blinkingly at Susan.

  She lay, light and fragile as a Tanagra figurine, upon the tousled bed. Her face was flushed and her sleeping mouth smiled voluptuously. The little bow had slipped from her knot of hair. Joe picked it off the sheet and tucked it gently into her shell-like navel. Then he bent and kissed her.

  “Sue! My Susan, you must wake. Come on, wake up. Hurry. Get into your clothes and find your way to the casino. We’re late, damn you, woman, and it is all your fault, you do realize?”

  He laughed at her sleepy, black-browed scowl, then ran out of the room and down the dark stairs and out of the ratty hotel.

  The station square in the hot morning sunlight was just as hard looking and as unattractive. He stood for a moment blinking in the doorway, then hurried down the public stairway to the lower street. There seemed to be a new system of parking since he was last here, and a fancily uniformed policeman—with unaccustomed lordliness—waved white gloves at the bewildered motorists.

  Veytaux’s getting ideas, he thought. Silly business to take away all the charm this damn place ever had. No amount of boxes of geraniums on the lampposts can cut down the glare of that bobby’s white helmet. What does he think he is, a bloody copper? And Sara will be sore at me—and with reason. Christ! It’s already after eleven! “Monsieur, wo ist, I mean, ou est le casino? Bitte? S’il vous plait, I mean.”

  He pegged rapidly along the hot crooked streets, following as well as he could the politely proffered directions. How could he have forgotten his French so quickly? Well, give Joe time and he’d have it back better than ever. Maybe after Sue left, he thought. Then he began to worry about when this might happen.

  He stopped suddenly and peered at the box of swo
llen mushrooms and a sheet of flour-dusted ravioli that lay coolly on a white marble slab in a store window. Would she leave? He’d pray if he could, would pray for twenty years, if she’d just now just please gather the guts to leave him. Then he could spend the last three weeks of his vacation in Paris or maybe go down to Beaune. But would she? Did he want her to go? How was he going to live without her? Joe was caught. He needed to talk to Sara Porter about it. Sara wasn’t much of a one for confidences but this was different.

  Almost directly above his head, a bell struck two quarters. “Damn it!” he swore aloud. Half past eleven! Then he hurried down the street to the marketplace and now, almost running, crossed by moving swiftly toward the looming bleak bulk of the casino, then on into its gardens where it was cool and green.

  Joe paused, wiped his wet forehead and his upper lip with the back of his hand—he never knew whether to kiss Sara or not, but he did believe he needed to be prepared for it—and went up onto the terrace.

  He’d hoped she’d be late herself but there Sara was, sitting in her cool and impersonal way, half in shade, half in sunlight, with amber burning in the glass of beer before her. Would she be furious with him?

  She looked up, smiled at him, so that was all right, then. At least she was glad to see him.

  “Hello, Sara!” he said. “God, I’m glad to see you!” His voice almost trembled in relief. “And God, I hope you can forgive me! I’ll never forgive myself for being so late, your having to wait . . .?”

  Sara smiled again, then put her cool lips against his cheek for an instant before she drew away.

  “Oh no, don’t kiss me!” she said quickly. “You’re hot, you’re damp. Sit down, Joe, and get your breath. You want a beer, don’t you? I can’t drink alone. Jean!” she said to the waiter who was flicking white linen tablecloths over the checked ones on the terrace tables. “Please bring another beer, no, two. You need more than one to begin with, Joe, and I’ll take some of it too.”

  “But . . .?” and here Sara stopped talking and looked completely puzzled for a few seconds before her face changed expressions and she demanded quickly, “But Susan? I almost forgot—this is the first time you’ve turned up with anyone else, you know? Where’s Susan? Didn’t you tell me last night on the telephone that she’s with you? Is she not well?”