Book Review : Delicate Tale of Irony in the Bleak Life of a ‘Companion’

The Companion by Chaim Bermant (St. Martin’s Press: $14.95; 208 pages)

Phyllis is a lady’s companion, a euphemism for maid, gardener, caretaker, cook and general dogsbody to Mrs. Martha Crystal, a vain, querulous and stingy widow. The two of them rattle around in a once grand suburban house called “Eden,” living in perpetual states of outrage at each other and the world in general. The arrangement suits them perfectly, offering Phyllis the chance to play martyr to Mrs. Crystal’s tyrant, roles they’ve perfected with time and learned to relish. Mrs. Crystal gets competent, if brusque care and the convenience of an in-house scapegoat; Phyllis gets room, board and material for this funny, original and surprisingly poignant novel. As trade-offs go, this one is fair enough.

A Few Perks

Though the difference between being a maid and a companion is mostly a matter of terminology, there are a few perks that go with the territory. Now that Phyllis has been promoted to this exalted position, she takes her meals with her employer in the kitchen, is allowed to accompany her on the annual holiday to a run-down seaside hotel favored by similar odd couples, and is occasionally invited to watch color TV in Mrs. Crystal’s bedroom, favors for which she is expected to show exaggerated gratitude. Instead, Phyllis turns the daily trivia of this constricted existence into a remarkably terse but thorough exploration of interdependence and ambivalence.

At first, life in Eden is enlivened by the presence of Mrs. Kilpatrick and her companion, Emily, who live on the same decaying crescent in a mansion called “Halcyon,” the names underlining the difference between past glory and present reality. The two old ladies visit each other twice weekly for tea, pushed back and forth by Emily and Phyllis, whose friendship parallels that of their employers.

As the virtual slave of Mrs. Kilpatrick--”the Dragon”--Emily clearly has the worst of it. Comparatively speaking, Phyllis’ “Old Woman” is a living doll. In the insults that she and Phyllis exchange, you can see vestiges of wit, and in her occasional gestures of grudging good will, an all but vanished charm. Despite their continual sparring, Phyllis and the Old Woman have a healthy respect for one another, but Emily isn’t so lucky by half. Her Dragon has reduced her to a trembling junket, kept from dissolving only by Phyllis’ spirited personality.

The death of Mrs. Kilpatrick destroys the delicate balance between Eden and Halcyon, leaving poor Emily homeless and the Old Woman deprived of her arch rival and only real friend. Without a third and fourth party to act as buffers, the arguments between Phyllis and Mrs. Crystal escalate and grow more rancorous, while Emily is forced to take refuge with her sister, who treats her even more shabbily than the Dragon ever did.

Though these may seem unprepossessing ingredients for a comic novel, Bermant does wonders with them. He provides Phyllis with a moment of romance on one of the grim seaside holidays, gives the Old Woman a chance to show the kind heart that still beats beneath the bombazine and produces a derelict brother to bring out Phyllis’ latent family feelings. For those few moments when the pace slackens and the tone threatens to become mournful, he inserts a couple of traveling salesmen and an ebullient floozy to prove that even an apparently meek and subservient companion can have a vibrant off-duty existence.

Phyllis is a terrific creation--proud, resilient and nobody’s fool, despite a life that’s been one rotten break after another. Mrs. Crystal, for all her crankiness and pathetic pretensions, manages to inspire a certain reluctant admiration. Sick, old and rapidly descending into not-so-genteel poverty, she remains indomitable, a one-woman Last Outpost of Empire. By taking a fundamentally bleak and static situation, inventing two remarkably complementary characters supported by assorted figures of fun, Bermant has created an ironic and altogether memorable novel, as delicately calibrated as a jeweler’s scale.