An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant

chapter xxii

chapter xxii Jeanne’s Sentimental Pilgrimage Idon’t think I am exaggerating when I say that for five years Jeanne asked, on an average, at least twice daily to be taken home. On the contrary, I am waiving the year of courtship, when Europe was but her bargaining point; and I do not even mention the Sundays and holidays when we were together also at the noon meal. Her manner of approach was subtly impersonal. The benefit was to be principally mine. “I should think,” she would open, “that twenty years of America would be about as much as anybody would want.You are getting horribly stale. You need a change of scene. Besides, what about your own native home? I should think you would be dying to see it again.” Clearly no man can go on indefinitely withstanding this kind of unremitting and insidious barrage. Little by little my resistance was breaking down. I began to feel that I was rather fed up. And as for the old place, why it was the one thing in all the world I wanted to see. It was the thought that some day I would go back that had kept me alive. Only I had been dreaming of it so long that the craving had come to seem more agreeable than the realization. To return to Rumania was like going to heaven, which, as we all know, is a good place to go to, but there is no hurry about getting there. Therefore, one day along about the middle of June in 1920, I surprised myself by saying: “Well, I don’t know but what it mightn’t be a good idea to knock off for a while. Supposing we do run over this fall. Then you can show me France and all the perfect people and things you have left behind you, and I’ll take a month or two to have a look at my own country.” We set about our preparations forthwith and with thumping hearts. It was astonishing the mass of work we had to do, the piles of things we had accumulated, the confusion of ties we had formed that must be unloosed. We had never guessed how rooted we had got in this land of our exile. My first thought had been nothing more ambitious than a flying trip. But as we went along Jeanne managed to convince me that 177 anything less than a year would hardly be worth the pains and the expense.Consequently we had pretty much to liquidate our affairs over here.It was like emigrating all over again,only backward,and with a lot more bundles than we—or at least I—had had to worry about that other time. Jeanne, indeed, was for disposing of our household belongings , which made me a little suspicious of her designs. We could get, she argued, so much nicer things in France, so much more reasonably. Everything was so much finer and better in France, according to Jeanne. I resisted that little stratagem. It was just that, I about decided. Therefore the house things must be stored. Besides, there was the lease to turn over, an office to be closed up, sailing accommodations to be reserved, a passport to be applied for, the rapidly melting bank balance to be withdrawn and partly converted into francs, a thousand business and family details to be attended to. And then there came an orgy of shopping. Suzanne and Louise must be fitted out presentably for introduction into their mother’s social circle in Paris. Jeanne’s ancient trunk and bag, which did well enough for vacations over here, were comically inadequate for such a tribal migration. My own prehistoric satchel, or whatever it was, had disappeared ages ago, along with many another precious heirloom, spiritual as well as material. The shopping, however, was in the main on behalf of the Europeans. One could not decently return, an American and empty-handed. Jeanne had it relatively easy, both because the interval of her absence had been so much briefer and because she had kept up a correspondence with her old world. She knew approximately what she wanted, and for whom. But I had not got a letter from Vaslui in seventeen years. The few kinsfolk and friends I presumably still had there, supposing they had survived the war and the peace—where were they? What were their ages, their condition, their tastes? I had not the remotest idea...