Collected Novels and Plays (55 page)

The matter of her finding work arose, horrifying Orestes. He had no claims, could not forbid her (his former hostess, now less than a guest) to look for a job. So he retreated into a childish coldness—let her just try independence, she would see her folly—broken by spells of frenzied rationality, budgets littering the vinyl table, aimed at keeping her by his side.

Dora had taken to going to Arthur Orson’s for tea every few days. Here her instinct was applauded. New York without a job could be a living hell—ask him, the idle old man chuckled, he ought to know. They put their heads together over the difficulties. She had come to America on a visitor’s, not a worker’s, visa—which by the way was due to expire in three months. She could renew it for another six, and would no doubt be quite ready for
repatriation at the end of them. “But suppose I’m not,” she asked Arthur, “suppose I want never to leave?”

“Then you will simply have to stay.”

“It’s not that simple. I should have to marry an American.” She was joking. “Can you picture it? At my age?”

Arthur looked at his chrysanthemums.

“Why not marry me?” he finally said.

When she told Orestes, he went all to pieces. “You aren’t serious,” he kept saying.

Dora asked if he could think of a more suitable arrangement.

“I wasn’t aware that your fondness for my country had reached such a pitch,” he said with the elegance of hurt feelings. “Or should I take it as a personal compliment?”

“If you like, my dear,” she replied gently. “Or think of it as self-indulgence.”
She let her hand rest upon one of that year’s anxiety-packed headlines. “I might not care to live through another war in Greece.”

“But with Arthur!”

“Really, Orestes. It would be a marriage of convenience. We’d live apart. Nothing’s settled in any case. All Arthur did was to bring up the possibility.”

“You’d go on living here with me? Would that look proper?”

“Does it look proper now?”

“This once, Dora, don’t be witty, I beg you. Marriage is a human sacrament,” said he who knew nothing about it. “I’m profoundly shocked to know that you would consider Arthur as a husband.”

She saw then and there that it would have to be Orestes whom she married.

Arguments came to support this daring notion. Under scrutiny the margin of years between them changed into an advantage. Arthur, despite his talk of living apart, was old and fragile; age could turn overnight into helplessness. As his wife—for Dora also took marriage seriously, having had thirty-eight years of it with Tasso—she would run the risk of becoming his companion, his nurse. No thank you! Then, Arthur’s world. It was too close to Athens
society—small, elderly, proper; a little went a long way. She had developed a taste for long bare avenues, glass buildings the light bounced off. With Orestes, now that the dawning on the terrace at Diblos lay behind her and, believe it or not as he pleased, no shred of longing remained, it seemed to Dora that this love overcome—if it had been love, there was no saying now—had earned her certain rights, that he owed her compensation, as if she had hurt herself in
his service. And she, why, she owed it to him to marry him! Who had wanted her here? Who had escorted her to this huge, glittering American function? It went against her upbringing to desert him now. No, while the chandeliers blazed, she was under Orestes’ protection; while the music played, she would face it at his side.

They exchanged vows and rings in a civil service in January. This time, at the party Arthur gave, the champagne was imported.

That night, a Saturday, Orestes, dressed in red silk pyjamas, knocked on the bedroom door. He was now The Bridegroom; he would have knocked at a cotton-gin’s door if he had just been married to one. As it was, his feelings for Dora had deepened and widened under

A miserable moment. Returning unexpectedly after starting for the beach, I found Chryssoula in my room. Cleaning? Something crackled guiltily, she was thrusting her hand into her blouse. I thought of the 500 drachma note hidden in this book. I questioned her. She showed her empty hands. I asked what was hidden in her blouse. Nothing! I knew she was lying. Suddenly she was in a fury. You think I’m a thief, search me! Eyes blazing. She seized
my hand & thrust it into her bosom where, along with everything else, was indeed a square of paper. It was my passport photo; there had been several in an envelope in my drawer. C. was in tears. I wanted to comfort her. Her lips compressed, she turned proudly aside. Now she has left. My image lies curled & damp on the table. “Sei bello,” she said, “ma non hai cuorc.” The lagoon shimmers. The torso lies outstretched at its far end. The
money was of course safe between these two blank pages. Her scent is on the palm I raise to hide my face. “The only solution is to be very, very intelligent
.”

the spell of having a sacramental role to perform. He had also drunk wine. Their relationship seemed to him one of infinite possibility.

She was still up and about, in her hairnet and old blue wrapper. “How smart you look,” she said, missing the import of his appearance.

“I wanted you to see that I was proud to be your husband,” said Orestes, smiling.

“Thank you, my dear. I’m very happy too.”

“Let me kiss you good night, Dora.”

“Good night, Orestes.” She gave him her roughened cheek. He held her a moment, weighing her unreadiness.

“Dora …?”

She drew back. When she raised her eyes it was in a slow look brimming
with comfort. She pressed his hand, then let go gently. Speechless, he took his leave.

Man and wife at last, their relationship was virtually at an end. No scenes, no recriminations, only this gradual firm gentleness on Dora’s part, and the difficulty of meeting her eyes for long. Who did meet those eyes, or what? The Dutch family’s cat. A stand of yellow, shuddering bamboo in a southerly angle of their house. Gray skies. Windows reflected in water.

One morning in March she discovered herself walking along a canal, an embankment anyhow, shining with frost and strewn with rusted fragments of machinery. It would have been quite early. The sun, low and mild, startled her, now in the sky, now glancing off the windows of a warehouse opposite. “But what am I doing here?” she said to herself in Italian. “Tasso will be furious.”

She tried to concentrate upon the cryptic litter of metal. A filthy yellow dog squatted in its midst, trembling violently; risen, it sniffed the steaming earth. When it turned to her, she saw a fresh wound on its head. “Cosa vuoi?” she asked it in a sweet, croaking voice, her hand held out appealingly. The air had grown warmer. Smells reached her; it was spring. The dog, grinning like a shark, had not moved. She walked deeper into the scene.

Later she was extremely tired. The police had odd uniforms and spoke English. She answered what she could of their questions. Her name? She gave it calmly. Yes, married; there was the ring on her finger. She told them Tasso’s name and where they lived. Was that in New Jersey? Doubt must have crossed her face. Next, they wanted to know what year it was. Really, how stupid! But she couldn’t tell from their faces whether her answer was right or wrong. She
begged their pardon, adding that she had had little or no sleep. The coffee they gave her was weak but delicious.

In the next room an officer was saying, “… Yes, come on down.… Legally, you understand, we ought to.… Yes … all right … O.K.”

Soon a fair woman who spoke French arrived at the police station, and kissed her. When Dora had not returned last night (the woman said) they had telephoned Orestes to find out if she had missed her train. Whom had they telephoned? Never mind. Hush. The panic was over, they had found her. A doctor was waiting to see her. Hush. Come.

Dora’s amnesia disappeared by evening and never recurred. The doctor saw her several times. He asked, had there been any recent shock or upheaval in her life? She told him no.

Orestes said, “Ah, Dora, I understand these things. It’s me you’re trying to forget. You want to blot out everything that has to do with me.”

Arthur said, “If
my
memory went, where would I be? Who would look after me? The very thought sends chills.”

On her next weekend in New York, Dora went to a hotel.

Shame was what
she
felt. To be found wandering, a derelict; anything might have happened. To be faced with the frailty of one’s reason, there among the rusted parts, the filth, in a glare that assailed one like the dog’s gaze, wherever one turned. As she stripped these painful details of a certain prismatic beauty that had overlaid them at the time, she recognized in their poverty, their menace, more and more of her situation with Orestes. Her
shame widened to include this, too.

She felt she had had the narrowest of escapes.

“I shall go back to Greece,” she said aloud to the hotel wallpaper. But her mistake, if it was one, seemed at once too grave and too recent to acknowledge by such a step.

“If it were not for Byron,” she told a tired, sympathetic face in the mirror.

On Sunday she forced herself to visit the apartment.

“Good evening, Baroness,” said the doorman.

“Dora!” exclaimed Orestes dramatically. “Are you all right? I’ve been terribly anxious. We all have. Arthur just phoned. I’ve had no sleep—”

She pressed his hand, nodding. It was the morning on the terrace, only he had slipped into her role. Well, he was welcome to it.

“We thought it must be another attack of amnesia.”

“No.”

“Where have you been, then? Arthur was calling the hospitals.”

She explained and begged his pardon.

“Give me your coat. Have you eaten?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Still, rather than look at her just then, he went to make her a sandwich.

“You are usually so thoughtful,” said Orestes, returning, with a smile of awareness. “Believe me, Dora, I understand more than you think.”

“Thank you, that looks delicious.”

“How you must resent me,” he went on. “How guilty you must feel for having used me.”

“What do you mean, Orestes?”

“For marrying me,” he said carefully as to a child, “so that you could stay in America.”

She watched him, wondering how much of the truth it was needful to point out.

Orestes blushed.

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” he said sadly. “Both of us wanted …”

“Go on. Tell me, please.”

“The experience. The insight. What else should one want, Dora?”

He had spoken simply. She shut her eyes, touched.

“Your generosity to me,” he said, “is something I can never forget—or, it would seem, repay.”

“Generosity, I don’t know …” she echoed vaguely in order not to be silent.

His
silence made her look. It was his turn to avoid her eyes. Ah!—“his” cottage on the property at Diblos. She smiled partly with irony—was he afraid she would ask for it back?—partly with pity. How much it must mean to him, if he could think of it now.

The mood changed. Out of habit, Orestes told Dora what he had done and whom he had seen during the week. She listened and commented, then:

“I ought to go now,” she said, rising. “I shan’t come to town next week. The week after, probably.”

What was happening? Orestes looked at her untouched sandwich, at the cracked leatherette seats of his chairs. The phrase, “the mother country,” lit on his mind like a flake of soot. He had been waiting for Dora to deny that she was through with him; instead, she stood at the door, an expression of perfect good nature masking her decision and conveying it in all its firmness. Her lover, he thought, the manager of the olive groves, dismissed.

In the days that followed, Orestes tried to reason that Dora was suffering from strain or fatigue or at worst from some passing mental illness; her mind had caught cold; soon she would be cured, they would again be friends. But his fantasies took off from a contrary assumption—she
was
in her right mind, she
had
dismissed him. He woke, weeping, from nightmares he hadn’t had since his analysis, dreams of falling in which balconies
crumbled from his grasp like birthday cake. What was this? He bent a sharp ear to his motives. The rupture evidently meant more to him than he knew.

All his life, Orestes recognized, he had been oftener at home with disciples than with friends or lovers. The last year was a remarkable exception, having brought him not only Dora but Sandy. After a certain age, however, the heart gives itself, if at all, too easily; the gift can be taken back. Orestes was nearing forty. His prime allegiance remained to his ideals or (if ever they conflicted with it) to his career.

He concluded tough-mindedly that it wasn’t Dora alone he would miss, but also the security she had given him and might now withhold. He considered, marveling coldly, how much self-knowledge had brought his cottage to mind at the crucial moment, and how much delicacy had kept him from mentioning it.

He oversimplified. Years later when, back in Greece, Orestes tried to take possession of his cottage pride barely colored his motives, greed not
at all. Nor did he expect, with his magic figures absent, to recapture the bliss of that time. But his tiled floor, his rock garden, his cove, the eucalyptus trees veined with leaf-gray and distant azure—a longing for these things, that is, for the sentimental truths they would still bear witness to,
had been welling up in him like a madness. He was actually relieved to learn, from Dora’s lawyer, that he had no claim on them whatever. It made the spirit purer in which he wrote his last letters to her. Even in America, at the time of their separation, Orestes had principally needed—since he wasn’t to have her love—a view of himself as morally finer than Dora.

She had shown him her way of ending an intimacy. He wished her now to sample his. Therefore, on her next coming to town, he arranged an evening. Ceremoniously he called for her at the hotel, pinned a flower to her coat, carried her suitcase—it was Sunday. After dinner in a French restaurant, through which both talked calmly if relentlessly of joint tax returns and not bothering to divorce and a novel Dora had liked and the still unsold Bokhara, he took her to the
theatre where they could hold their tongues in peace. The play was
Othello
. “It seemed more fitting to let art have the last word,” said Orestes in the taxi, although by then she had seen what he was up to. In due course the beautiful words began to sound, the play to unroll like a great Venetian curtain, first abstracting their life together, then enveloping it. By the last act, Dora was asleep, muffled in gold. Her gentle snores brought it to his attention;
as a detail, it seemed ironically right. In the end, screams woke her. The black actor was strangling the white actress. A violence to which all the words had been leading. She turned to Orestes, her eyes opened, inquiringly but with no single inquiry. Would it end in time for her train? Came to mind along with, Would it not have helped to strangle
her?
—both frivolous questions, she knew, seeing his face lifted calm into the bluish light of the stage, the shining
snail’s track of a tear drying along his nose. Soon after that it did end; she was early for her train. On the platform he remembered to give her a letter, addressed to them both, from Sandy in
Colombo. Dora promised to return it, thanked Orestes for the evening, without reflecting offered him her cheek to kiss, did not take in the proud averting of his lips, and entered the coach. He stood watching her framed by her window’s lighted oblong. She had
made herself comfortable. Her eyes were meeting his with as much gravity as he could have wished until, the train filling up, a Negro sailor took the seat next to her, and she, hoping to make Orestes smile, raised both hands to her throat and pretended to squeeze. Through the glass she felt his sad impatience, dropped her hands, began to glide, before he could think what was happening, out of his sight.