Collected Novels and Plays (53 page)

“And Eleni?” asked Arthur’s better nature, one of whose favorite stories it was.

“Agh. She remarried, miraculously.”

“Why so? Wasn’t she still very lovely?”

“Yes, perhaps. But a shrew. She drove him to his death.”

“Oh? It wasn’t cancer, then?”

“Am I expected to remember everything? Whatever it was, he died, Eleni remarried, and my little namesake—he was given Orson as a second name, you recall—went off with her to far-away Texas.”

They had kept in touch, but Arthur did not see his godson again until he was thirty and a Professor, with degrees.

To the surprise of both, they became friends. Each probably amused the other by his inexperience. Arthur went so far as to enroll in one of Orestes’ night classes for adults. Words like “antithesis” or “metaphysical,” or sentences beginning “The poet in his lonely search for belief …” made his eyes shift nervously, but he enjoyed the relish with which Orestes could utter them. Afterwards would come a removal to
somebody’s apartment, wine and cookies, more talk. One night Tennyson was mentioned. “Oh,” said Orestes at once, “an extraordinary technician but a minor poet. It is hard for me to feel his greatness.” Wasn’t “In Memoriam” a great poem? “The poem he wrote for Arthur Hallam,” Orestes began, pausing because of the other Arthur in his audience, whom he wanted to savor the pleasant coincidence of names;
“Tennyson’s friend who died young,” he went on, and now met Arthur’s eyes, reminded of his similar loss (which was, to be sure, Orestes’ own as well)—“Yes, perhaps ‘In Memoriam’ is a great poem. A sensibility as delicate as Tennyson’s could draw from a friend’s death insights analogous to those of the saint in contemplation of Christ’s passion. These insights are all the more poignant for contemporary
readers like ourselves, for whom the Christian myth has fallen to pieces. Only a supreme artist in our day can solder them together. You will understand how I feel about ‘In Memoriam’ if you compare it with Eliot’s magnificent
collage
of faith and faiths—Tennyson on the one hand, content to echo the cadences of Anglican hymns; Eliot on the other, aware in his sophistication that the fragments he has ’shored up’ are valid
because
of their flaws, their inefficacy as living doctrine—” Enough. Orestes’ talk popped with allusion and paradox. It was like sitting by a fire. At the evening’s end Arthur breathed the cool of his own life gratefully.

From him Orestes learned—no, Orestes never learned. He lacked skill and patience to help work the crazy quilt of amenity and obligation
that was the older man’s daily life. Everything Arthur did related to others. Even in museums he stood longest in front of paintings whose previous owners he had known—Miss A.’s Manet, Lord B.’s Crivelli. On the way out he would stop to say hello to one of the curators. Months later
he took Orestes to dinner in this man’s apartment. Orestes was the only guest not in evening clothes. He soon found, furthermore, that his discourse curdled the bland flow of talk and gossip. Before long he was listening in appalled fascination, beyond speech as the others were beyond thought—for so he unjustly dismissed them, blind to the intense thought behind the flowers, the china, the menu, and deaf to the truth of any remark clever enough to make him smile. Here
Orestes was close, as Arthur pointed out, to contradicting himself. What was this cleverness if not a kind of poetry? Didn’t his own lectures sparkle with it? Ah, but no—Orestes’ lectures were about serious things. Poetry, for Arthur, might be cleverness, mere icing on the cake; for Orestes it was a way of life. “Believe me,” said his friend, “so is cleverness. By the way your manners are improving. You didn’t fold your napkin when you
got up from table.”

It was Aesop’s fox and stork all over again. Arthur lapped a bit from the top of the jar; Orestes stabbed guardedly at the shallow dish. Their partings were warm with relief. And when Orestes finally sailed for Greece, Arthur gave him a larger check than he had intended.

At last the doorbell rang. Here they were. As he hastened to admit them, Arthur’s numerous misgivings about Dora shrank to one childish prayer: “Let her be able to appreciate me, let her see that I have taste!”

His living room was painted dark red and ivory. It had one antiqued-mirror wall, a piano (Arthur had resumed his lessons, after fifty-five years), velvet chairs, gladiolas in silver vases. There were many Greek objects: amber rosaries, a good ikon, and some large, prominently hung sepia photographs of sculpture—the Charioteer, the Hermes at Olympia, the Ephebe at Constantinople. Indeed, Dora exclaimed with pleasure.
She did feel at home, she
had had no idea from Orestes that one could be so comfortable in New York; so that, with no further thought given to the qualms each had felt with respect to the other (for Dora, too, had begun to sprinkle large grains of salt on Orestes’ judgments of people), she and Arthur sat down, vastly pleased with their mutual surfaces, to Turkish coffee and a sweet on a spoon. Orestes, overexcited, paced the room. They watched him indulgently, like parents whose child has come
home.

Arthur, a little man, sallow and vain, with a mole on his forehead and eyebrows long as antennae, was presently dreaming of taking her over, introducing her as
his
friend and sharing in the invitations she would receive. Orestes wanted her to see
things;
he had been picturing her excitement in zoos, on the top of skyscrapers, in the subway. Dora obliged them both.

Within a few days she had been to Chinatown, Bloomingdale ’s, the Frick, Staten Island, had watched TV and been given an evening party. Arthur spent most of that day polishing silver candlesticks, washing long-stemmed glasses he hadn’t used for months, and arranging flowers. “You’ve gone to too much trouble,” said Orestes, inwardly delighted, on his return with Dora from their apartment hunt. Arthur merely shrugged. He knew no other
way to give a party. Certainly the surer thing was to prepare one’s background, order things to eat, serve champagne—domestic, if need be—in thin crystal, than to rely on kind words and gestures. What if the heart were not inspired to warmth, the tongue to liveliness? One must provide against that kind of failure. And the party, considering that most of the people Arthur knew were dead or out of town for the summer, went off quite passably. Nothing was broken.
The handful of Bohemians invited by Orestes stayed too late but otherwise behaved. Cold cuts and petits fours remained which would do for Arthur’s lunch the next day. And he felt that his guests (the museum director, the piano teacher, ten all told) had got the point of Dora. Despite her costume.

Orestes had had her wear an ankle-length black lace dress, old yet in itself becoming. Then, horrors! minutes before the first arrivals, he opened a paper bag and took out a yard of broad crimson moiré ribbon. This he draped Dora with, diagonally, like some ambassadorial decoration fastened by pins at shoulder and hip, and at the breast by a brooch of her own. It cost Arthur an effort to smile and say nothing, as Dora herself did, and wait for
the first person to whom Orestes introduced her as the “Greek Ambassadress” to see the joke before he, Arthur, allowed himself to remark that fun was fun but decorations were decorations.

Dora would have agreed with him on a different occasion, but she felt more warmly toward Orestes now than she had in the weeks before they reached New York, and she had resolved to take pleasure in whatever made him happy. Watching him in relation to Arthur, it gratified her to see, as with Orestes and his brother, that two highly dissimilar individuals were drawing closer through her, and was European enough to wonder, where Arthur was concerned—an elderly man,
without heirs—if this increased closeness mightn’t lead to something rather agreeable for Orestes. For herself, she objected not one bit to dressing up as grander than she was. We all dream of coming back from the Flea Market with a Fragonard. If Orestes wanted to have brought from Europe something more than an old island woman, she would lend herself to his plot, she would impersonate the fabulous souvenir. Meanwhile, her eyes had been open. Beginning with that green,
torch-bearing giantess in the harbor, all militant wakefulness compared to her sleeping, natural sister viewed from Diblos, Dora had taken in a type of New York woman—in the street, in the pages of
Vogue
—angular, high-heeled, hatless, being dragged hilarious down the pavement by a huge shaven dog, or squinting heavenwards with a look of utter, harrowed anxiety which must be, in this city at least, as much beauty’s indispensable earmark as an enigmatic
smile had been in Leonardo’s Italy. It was not a type Dora cared to resemble. Yet she already knew, from being dragged down pavements
by Orestes, something of what lay in the heart of the woman with the poodle, and beneath Dora’s tanned, lined face and fingers placidly, clumsily mending a tear in the black lace dress, had already appeared the psychic counterparts of furrowed brow, strained, painted mouth, knuckles clenched white—all ignored,
all nonetheless ready for use at the first proof of her own total folly to have considered (at her age!) making a life among the barbarians.

There, then, she stood among them, the Ambassadress, sipping the Great Western champagne. Compared to her, the others were friendlier, better informed, more intense, or more talkative; her failure in these respects seemed rather to strengthen her position. To have been European
and
immensely charming might have been more than the company could bear. She raised her glass to Orestes across the room.

His eyes had been on her. It had just entered his head to have her talk to his mother on the telephone. In Greek, naturally! “What a good idea,” said Dora. Soon she was called into Arthur’s bedroom. Eleni, in Texas, was already on the line and Orestes—talking English—had finished what he had to say. Dora found herself uttering a tentative “Hello” into the receiver. “Talk Greek! Talk Greek!” cried Orestes.
She did so, found easily a number of cordial phrases, mentioned her fondness for both Eleni’s sons, hoped before long to know
her
as well—but then, as Eleni replied, it became plain, with every allowance for fluster, that Greek was no longer a tongue she could speak to any useful degree. It made no difference; Dora slipped back into English, remarked the extent of Eleni’s, modified her own to suit it, and so ended the conversation.

“She sounds
very
nice,” she told Orestes. “I should love to know her. What an absorbing life that must be!” He, however, dragged her back to the party. “I couldn’t believe it!” he told group after group. “My mother can’t speak Greek any more! I was amazed! She and I speak English together—
my
Greek was lousy before I went to Greece. But imagine! She’s forgotten it! And her
English isn’t fluent, is it, Dora? Do you see what that means? My mother has no language!”

“There must be more important things in life,” said Dora, embarrassed. He had made it sound very dire.

“Than language?”

“Than languages, surely.”

“That coming from you who speak four perfectly! Ha ha!” cried Orestes throwing his arms around her and her enhanced value. People did that in America, she had noticed, though he had now gone on to tell some others how physical the Greeks were, how they couldn’t talk without touching or hugging each other. “Yes,” said Dora, “but you’re talking of a certain class. Tasso could never bear to be touched, neither could Byron,
even as a child.” But anything she said made him like her more. “You see,” his smile told the room, “she knows, she’s the genuine article.”

That evening, for the first time in their friendship, Orestes became “an American” in Dora’s eyes. She glimpsed the larger, national mystery behind his manners, that pendulum swinging from childish artlessness to artless maturity and back again. She welcomed the insight gaily, secure in her resiliency. When the museum director, saying goodnight, promised to telephone in the morning to give her the name of “a really dependable rug man”
through whom to sell her Bokhara, she begged him not to go out of his way. “Oh well, yes, the rug must be sold eventually, but I won’t have my friends feeling responsible for me. I’d be happy on the corner with a cart full of apples!”

Dora and Orestes found an apartment, no floor of a brownstone house, as recommended by Arthur and which was available at great cost (unless in such poor condition as to remind Orestes of the primal tenement he was still running away from); instead, three rooms in a new, mountainous “development” overlooking the East River. It had a uniformed doorman—whom Orestes trained, without letting him in on the joke, to call Dora
“Baroness”—and a lobby decorated by Dorothy Draper. There was Musak in the self-operated elevators. The riverfront apartments, it turned out, cost ten dollars per room more each month
than those facing other tall buildings. “We’ll know the river’s there,” Dora said.

On the eighteenth floor they had plenty of light. Their living room was too large, the bedroom and kitchen too small. When it came to furniture, Orestes developed a violent phobia of anything secondhand, so that for their first dinner at home they drew two shiny metal and leatherette chairs up to a vinyl-topped cardtable. Dora switched off a three-headed lamp. Candlelight richened the Bokhara and blurred a pattern of orange and green boomerangs on the sofa bed and the
wall to wall, ceiling to floor draperies installed that day against the cruel afternoon glare. The friends drank to their new home. It was costing a lot but they had done it, it was theirs, and Orestes, for one, felt that these new, durable, practical possessions would save expense in the long run. Three months passed. The chair seats were cracking to reveal gray cotton wadding, somebody’s cigarette had blistered the table. The Bokhara was still on the floor but the curtains
did not close, or the bed open, properly, and Dora was working as a governess in New Jersey.

It was better than it sounded. The family was Dutch, the daughters twelve and fourteen. Dora walked them to school, returned to the house, made a bed or two, ate on a tray with the grandfather in his room, read, fetched the girls, took one to her music lesson and did Greek or Italian conversation with the other. The family dined together, Dora with them. Both parents were translators at the United Nations. On weekends Dora was free to join Orestes.