The Eleventh Year (6 page)

“A few days. Thence we go to Irkutsk, and then to Harbin. We're on our way to Shanghai, where we hope not to hear the word ‘war' mentioned. Actually it's peaceful here—”

“But too much peace can dull the mind, the senses. Allow me to call on you at your hotel—” I mustn't beg, Elena told herself. I must seem in control.…She clenched her hands into fists on her lap, but kept her eyes clear, her smile perfect.

“Wonderful! Here's our address. Would you care to meet us tomorrow for tea? But not here. We shall take it in our rooms, which are infinitely better decorated than…this.” Genia moved her head, encompassing the room in one gesture. She took out a piece of paper from her fine leather bag, extracted a small silver pen, and wrote down the information.

Elena took it. She felt, in the instant of contact, a shock close to electricity, as if something beyond her scope was warning her that this was the way out of exile, out of the Siberian wasteland. She stood up, hoping the Adlers wouldn't stare too much at her old coat, and extended her hand, first to Fania, then to her sister. “I shall come. It was so delightful to meet you. We shall talk of Paris and of Moscow. But perhaps not, because the war is so much on all our minds. Instead we'll talk about your trip, we'll feast on pagodas and rickshaws—”

“Yes, we shall!” Fania agreed warmly. Neither of the Adlers was even looking at her pelisse, and inwardly Elena sighed with relief. She inclined her head, smiled once more, and departed, striding as was her custom. Her heart was knocking inside her with suppressed excitement. Yet she couldn't explain her feelings in any concrete, reasonable terms. The Adlers were the opportunity seized on the cuff, the shower of gold captured in an instant—a propitious instant. When Fate extended her hand, one had to grasp it without a second's hesitation….

The next day she dressed carefully, simply but well. She had never worn the frills that women had enjoyed in the past, because she knew she looked better in clothes that would offset her unusual beauty without offering competition of their own. The Adlers were waiting for her, and there was a marvelous array of tea cakes in the salon of their suite. Elena began to talk, pleasantly, of teas she had attended in the past, of the Tsarina Alexandra, of her sister, the Grand-Duchess Ella, who had become a nun after her husband's vicious murder. But she skipped quickly onto the subject of art, of concerts, of dances, for the tsar was not only a sore subject to her, but also surely to her hostesses if they were Jewish. She asked questions, laughed, ate, but all the time she existed outside herself, watching herself consciously pretending to be carefree. At the end of the afternoon she consulted a small gold watch that was pinned to her jacket, and she murmured: “I must go! I hope that you will still be in town tomorrow?”

“Oh, certainly. Will you come back, Princess Elena?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

Outside, hugging her old coat to her sides, she wondered: But how much longer shall I be able to act the part of Scheherazade and detain them from leaving? She thought of the bureau in the bedroom of their hotel, and of the fabrics and jewels literally spilling from its drawers. Her mouth was wet with hunger, and her nerves were on edge.

J
amie felt
immense peace of mind at Vassar. From her room in Main Hall, she could overlook the fall leaves gathering in romantic piles over the hills. She liked to walk to class among the old stone buildings. There was security at Vassar, security in its past, security in its own future and, therefore, in hers too. She had felt closed in by Cincinnati, by the world of her mother and father. Now she felt free, limitless, like a blank page on which anything could be written.

She was rooming with a girl who was as different from her as anyone could ever be, Jamie thought. Lesley Aymes Richardson was so small, so elegant, so utterly graceful in the simplest movement she executed—in hanging her fox cape in the closet, in pulling down the cuffs of her starched bishop sleeves. Sometimes Jamie envied her. Lesley was so perfect, like a doll that sits on top of a musical box, turning and turning, without fault unless its owner forgot to wind the key underneath the box. Lesley was a quiet girl, reserved yet friendly. She had beautiful skin, the translucent skin of natural redheads, and long, silky hair that every morning she parted with her silver and ivory comb, let fall over the ears, and swooped in one single gesture into a knot at the back, secured with pins and flowers. Her eyes were a brilliant green, flecked with gold, and she wore a large emerald on her left ring finger. She moved her hands, fluttered them in the air, when she spoke. And sometimes when Jamie returned from class she would find Lesley sketching by the window, a look of absorption on her triangular face. It was difficult to guess what she thought, or where she wished her life to proceed.

Lesley didn't talk much about her family, but everyone at Vassar courted her, wanting her to join the most exclusive sororities, because her father was a millionaire in New York City and her mother was the only daughter of a British peer of ancient lineage. Yet Lesley seemed to float above this, smiling slightly at Jamie and saying almost apologetically: “It's all such nonsense, isn't it? Everyone wants to ‘belong.' It's the country club syndrome all over again. We all think we're so much better if we can say that So and So belongs to the same institution as we do—but that has no meaning.”

Jamie wondered what did have meaning for this pretty girl. She went to Yale and Harvard and Williams just like the other rich girls, and there were letters from young men in the mailbox several times a week. There were telephone calls from her mother, and Jamie noticed that every time they came, Lesley's face would close into a tight, hard line. Those from her father produced an opposite reaction. Oh, well, thought Jamie, I can't stand Mother either, but Father is of a different breed. Perhaps, after all, she and her roommate weren't so different beneath their appearances.

Jamie didn't much care how she dressed. Skirts had risen in 1915 to reveal the ankle, and women's dresses were of a loose, ample style that fit her own voluptuous build rather well. But she possessed only a few outfits. She didn't want to be introduced to eligible young men, because she wanted above all to earn her degree. Willy remained an ache in her heart. It was difficult not to give in to the desire to write to him. I wonder if I was really in love with him, she thought, or if we were

simply so used to each other that things just developed the way they did because that was the logical outcome. She felt a certain detachment from Lesley and the other girls, because she had slept with a man, and, for the most part, they hadn't. They did everything
but,
Jamie decided, rather nauseated by their lack of honesty. I'm not ready, she thought, to play the games that are required of women today. At least with Willy I wasn't wasting our time being a flirt and a tease.

The truth was too that Jamie didn't have the necessary knowledge of society games. The “country club syndrome” of which Lesley had spoken so casually was something with which she was totally unfamiliar. The country club at home was far away, in Indian Hills, ensconced among the palatial grounds of the very wealthy. At the country club the girls and young men went riding. Lesley had her impeccably fitted riding attire, of course, but Jamie had never even been on a horse. There was a world of difference between them that could never be traveled.

Jamie worked, too, to supplement her scholarship, while others sat on the grass and talked about conquering the most outstanding Big Man on Campus from Harvard or Princeton. Jamie did research for Gertrude Buck, one of the English professors, and she loved her time in the stacks of the Thompson Memorial Library. She could lose herself in old manuscripts, wondering what it must have been like in Thackeray's England, in Chaucer's. She was so hungry for the written word that it hardly mattered whose word it was as long as it was well turned out. She wished beyond anything that she possessed the talent of a Virginia Woolf.

When Lesley went back to New York for elegant parties thrown by one or another of the matrons of Fifth Avenue, Jamie stayed alone, appreciating the narrow room with its simple wooden furniture. She also liked the dignified professors, women in long ungainly skirts, their hair in simple buns, and men with clear, intellectual brows, mustaches, and beards. But when she imagined herself acting the role of Professor Buck, something made her draw back. First of all, there was a sexlessness about her that was sad. Life had to be a passion play, didn't it? At some point a woman met the ideal man, someone of equal intellectual bent, and something happened. Besides, Professor Buck studied the words of others. Jamie wanted to write her own words, to break through to some sort of discovery, to some sort of verity that she and she alone could impart to her readers. The writer, she thought, was like a fine funnel. Life poured experiences haphazardly into him or her, and it was then through the writer that these experiences were ennobled and that tragedy and comedy emerged from the natural chaos of everyday existence. She envied Theodore Dreiser, who could write about a young man's desire to conquer the world and how one false move turned this ambition into a disaster. She herself wanted not so much to conquer the world as to reach men's souls—the very heart and guts of them. She felt dwarfed by those who had succeeded in reaching hers—yet also impelled even more to draw up the juices of her own creativity, pouring them out into a finished product that would strike each reader in the deepest part of his own being.

It was difficult to get to know Lesley, and Jamie had to admit that she wasn't quite sure she really wanted to know her. There were conflicting elements about her roommate. She read Freud, Maria Montessori, and the newly published
Education and Democracy
by John Dewey. But at Vassar there were other girls who affected interest in psychology and a writer-philosopher who was clearly in vogue. Afterward, when no one was looking, they reverted to their diet of
The Atlantic Monthly
or that staple of middle-class gentility,
The Ladies' Home Journal.
Jamie wondered what Lesley understood beyond the obvious fact that Freud was obsessed by sex. How profound was she, after all? She drew good sketches but not outstanding ones. Yet how could one exist merely to exist, without pursuing a lifetime ambition, without wanting to distinguish oneself?

In November Lesley joined the Woman's Suffrage Club, and it was then that Jamie dared ask, piqued suddenly by new curiosity: “Do you think that women are more intelligent than men?”

Lesley had just walked in, and she removed her hat, hung it on a hook, and threw herself like a graceful rag doll on her narrow cot. She was thoughtful.
“Some
women,” she finally replied. “It's hard to tell. Men are out in the world and their wives aren't. So it's difficult to judge the intelligence of most women. But if we had the vote, if we were given confidence—then perhaps we'd come out of our shells and be our real selves, and then test the intelligence we're not supposed to be allowed to use.”

Jamie nodded. That was an excellent, perceptive answer. “If you were to choose the ideal way in which to exercise your own intelligence, what would you do?”

Lesley smiled—that remote, dreamy smile that was at once so reservedly British and so vulnerable in its fear of appearing ridiculous. “I'd be Rosa Bonheur. I'd paint the most glorious paintings a woman could paint. But Professor Chatterton doesn't think I have that much talent.”

Jamie winced. Clarence Chatterton was the artist in residence at Vassar, and she thought: How horrible to have your dearest illusions crushed before you even have a chance to test them out! How dreadful to be told there isn't enough in you.…Dr. Buck always commended Jamie, read her poems and prose pieces, critiqued them, certainly, but never without encouragement. How did one go on
living
when a “superior” being—one who truly possessed the talent to which you yourself were aspiring with tears of desire and frustration—informed you, point-blank, that you were never going to have it?

“So if you're not going to be Rosa Bonheur,” she plunged in, feeling such compassion that she put forth the most positive front she could muster, “what
are
you going to be?” She could never recall Lesley's expressing an enduring interest in any other subject besides art.

Lesley looked at her gravely. “I don't have the slightest idea.”

Jamie was disappointed. “Then…you want to be married, I guess.”

“So far I've not met the man to make me think so. No, I don't want that,” She leaned on her elbows and said, “What I'd like to do is travel! I want to see something of the world. I've thought, now that there's a war on, of going to England and becoming a nurse. Or to France. There's such a great need for nurses—for committed women—”

“You'd put yourself right into a war zone?”

“Well, the boys do, don't they, over there? My father says it won't be that long before America has to enter into the conflict. I feel…strange about that. I don't believe in war. But on the other hand, if the fellows are out there dying, we should also be doing our share. I mean, if we want the vote….”

“Nobody seems to care much about the war, here at Vassar,” Jamie reflected pensively.

“Nobody cares much about
anything
here. Except the latest movie! Sometimes I can't stand it. Everyone wants to be just like everybody else. That's why I like Chatterton so much. His ideas are different, and he doesn't give a damn whether anyone agrees with them or not.”

Jamie was silent. She was thinking of what it must mean to live in an artistic community where others shared your passions and your ideals, where convention was laid at the doorstep like a pair of shoes in front of a house in Tokyo. She said softly: “It would be wonderful to travel. Not to be in the United States.”