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
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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
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.
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