The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (24 page)

“Who?”

“Rabbi Warschauer.”

“Why him? Mom is getting worse and worse. Ever since you joined the temple, she’s really throwing herself into all this stuff.”

“Yes, but Carl Warschauer is a nice young man. Not rigid like the older men. If your mother has to take advice from these rabbis, then I’m happy it’s a man like Carl.”

She waved to her father as he drove off, a fat, middle-aged man, looking a little anxiously back at his daughter. She sighed. What a bunch of brothers! she thought. Dad, Harry and Alec, the inevitable assemblage outside the synagogue. Only Alec probably wouldn’t be there.

“Hi, Elly,” Charley Maxwell called out, swinging a sweater at her.

“Hi,” she answered distantly. Charley was such a kid.

“Well,
all right
,” Charley said, annoyed.

She walked toward the Science Building, aware that she was a little late. But she did not hurry. All the courses she was taking were crap courses, except Professor Lanner’s philosophy classes. There Elly could match wits with the teacher, always coming off badly, but enjoying it fiercely. He looked a little like John Marron Lang, this professor, but he had none of Lang’s tenderness or delicacy. She relished the idea of being late. She would cause a little stir and he would remark on it. To which she might or might not reply. At any rate Elly knew she was not really attending Crofts; she was just killing time until she could get away—this time it was probably to Europe. She presented to her classmates and teachers an air which the students vaguely defined as snotty and the teachers as antisocial. She thought of it, herself, as preserving a sense of detachment: in a sense keeping herself eternally prepared for the future.

She entered the classroom.

“Thank you, Miss Kaufman.”

Elly turned to her teacher with mock wide eyes. “What for, Professor Lanner?”

“For joining us, Miss Kaufman. We are discussing Pascal this morning. There is in all of his work a great sense of loneliness. We don’t want to add to that by your absence, do we?”

“I’ll try to be as considerate of Monsieur Pascal as I can from now on. I have enough on my conscience, without adding his loneliness to it.”

At this the class realized laughter would be in order and a titter spread around the room as Elly seated herself. They never quite knew how to take this verbal sparring. The student body at Crofts was quite different from the students at Vernon. Less sophisticated; for the most part, local people. Elly felt no kinship with them at all. She had dated one or two boys in the year she had been at Crofts but found she could sustain no interest in them. She felt as if she had passed some body of water beyond which the other students could not pass. It was as if she were shouting to them from across the sea.

In the afternoon she had some time between classes and she walked to the library. On the way in she met Fred Sachs, a boy she’d met a few times at the Y in town. He was a tall, skinny, pimply-faced boy, and were it not for the fact that he resembled Uncle Alec somewhat (she lived in a world of resemblances—the important thing about most people and events was that they either resembled or did not resemble one of the few people and events she held very close to her), she would not have tolerated him at all. Now she was annoyed on encountering him, but allowed him to accompany her into the library. She picked up a volume of Proust, and when the boy saw that she was determined to read and not whisper he left. Her breath coming a little faster, Elly picked up the volume of Proust and tucked it under her arms as if she had brought it with her. The librarian was reading a newspaper and looked up as Elly passed her. Whistling her defiance, Elly walked out the door. The back of her neck prickled and she was ready, as she walked, to hear a call and to say, “Oh, yes, I forgot to check it out.” But there was no call now. As she had done many times before in the last year, she had taken another book. She had a library card, as well as enough money to buy all the books she wanted. But she had a tendency to keep books so far overdue that annoying post cards arrived and fines were imposed. It was so much easier this way, and also rather exciting. When she got the books home, they were placed in the bookcase, along with those legitimately purchased and then forgotten.

The afternoon sun was clear and bright as Elly walked down the large quadrangle, and girls in sweaters and skirts were sprawled on the grass chatting with boys in big, bright sweaters or tweed jackets. On either side of her the long, neat green of the campus stretched. There was too much space, too much brightness. Elly felt unreal. Lately this feeling had taken possession of her at about two-thirty in the afternoon. It was then that the day seemed interminable, and if anything good was to happen, it would have occurred already. By two-thirty in the afternoon the morning seemed far enough away never to have existed and the few hours remaining before the protective darkness of evening seemed infinitely long. If at home, she would get up and walk to the hill-wall and stare down the hill desolately, wondering if she really lived at all. She had read Huxley and liked the idea that perhaps the earth was the hell of some other planet. Then, one afternoon, when this feeling of unreality was still new to her, the thought had come, sly and unbidden, that perhaps the earth was the
heaven
of some other planet. For days afterwards she had had to fight off a delicious sort of terror when the thought returned.

She returned home through the afternoon brightness and dropped off her books, carefully placing the stolen one in the bookcase in her room. Then she took the Ford out and drove in the direction of Westfield. But the drive held no pleasure for her. All about her, caught in the grip of the tired afternoon, were stretches of level land, undiversified, unchallenging. She remembered the hills that had rimmed the horizon the day they had gone fishing in Vermont and the loveliness of being held by the earth, as if the mountains and the land formed a cupped hand in the center of which she walked. The slope on which the Kaufmans lived was the only hill worthy of the name for miles around.

She drove almost to the town of Westfield where, she knew, Professor Lanner had his home. Having no idea of anything she wanted to say to him, nevertheless she drove right up to his garage and parked outside. As in a dream, she meandered toward the house, a little frightened by her lack of a specific mission. Someone inside the house was pounding on the piano and making meaningless sounds. The windows were open to the late-afternoon coolness and a party seemed to be in progress. As she approached the window Elly realized that Professor Lanner had frightened her and, as well, seemed to be frightened by her. As a pair, they seemed to have an enormous potential for coming into conflict with each other. She appeared suddenly at the window, like an ashen-haired apparition. The room was quite full of people and Elly realized with something of a shock that it was a cocktail party and she had been driving long enough for the afternoon to have died while she rode. It must be after five o’clock.

Ralph Lanner saw her standing, as if in a suddenly arrested flight, and she at the same moment saw him, dressed as he was in the subtle tensions existing between them in class, in the fear she felt when she thought of him alone at home, his lips clothed in the smile that seemed to imply to Elly that he could, if he chose, destroy her. In that instant she remembered with a sense of shame that she had told him about herself, when first meeting him, and in the first flush of her new loneliness and because of his resemblance to John Marron Lang. It was as if she knew that speaking of herself to strangers—and all were strangers—made her vulnerable, and yet she must do it. The past, even yesterday, became unreal if it went un-mentioned for too long and becoming unreal, threw some doubt on the actuality of her existence.

They stood outside of the party for an instant, poised—to Elly—on the sharp edge of the hostilities she had created. Then he moved toward the open window and she vanished and a few moments later was driving back the way she had come. Fighting off the sensation of hatred and anger, as if Lanner had in some way betrayed her a few moments ago, she saw the shape of the great hospital outside Westfield. We live in museums, she thought. There in that gray-surfaced structure was the Elly of eleven and ten and nine years old, every Saturday morning, clutching the worn clinic card, waiting impatiently for her turn while Rose read a magazine and at intervals cautioned her to be quiet, that she was “in a hospital.”

We live in museums, she thought, but at least I have the house. The house was clean, except for a few exhibits: Elly in bed with Lang in the unfurnished house, Elly waking the morning after her return from New York and going to the window in sudden fear. It was a cloudy morning and it seemed to her that the glass was reflecting too much, that it was not clear enough, not exposing enough of the world to her sleep-moist eyes. The exhibits were building. In another year the glass house would be a museum too.

When she entered the house, her mother was talking in the living room with a slender young man who couldn’t seem to decide whether he should rise or not for Elly. He appeared to want someone to tell him, She’s a girl, or, She’s a woman. He settled for raising himself from his chair for an instant and saying “How do you do” when Rose introduced them. Elly was surprised to find the young man was a rabbi—the rabbi, in fact, of the temple that Rose and Max had recently joined.

He held his eyeglasses in his hand, and from the way he squinted he seemed the most nearsighted person Elly had ever seen. She was not at all sure that he actually saw her until he placed his horn-rimmed glasses gently on the bridge of his nose.

“How are you, Elizabeth?” he said.

He was, she saw instantly, an “Alec.” All slender men were “Alecs”—Lang, Lanner, this Carl Warschauer. Other men, like Uncle Harry, her old piano teacher, Mr. Larkin, were “Max’s.” It was largely a matter of physical make-up. As she grew to know them they separated into an enormous number of categories, some losing their “Alec-ness” or their “Max-ness,” some gaining even more.

What is this? Carl Warschauer was thinking. No wonder they’re worried about her. She’s much too wild and lovely for any Jewish family living in Colchester. He caught himself immediately thinking reproachfully of his own mother and her wide-open green eyes and long red hair. Why must all the lovely ones be like her? His father had been attractive in
his
own way. Why can’t the lovely ones be dark and slow-moving, as he was? Adam and Eve, he thought—all their children.

“I’m fine,” she said. “A little high, though. I’ve just been to a cocktail party.”

“Where?” Rose asked sharply.

“Professor Lanner’s home over at Westfield.”

“That’s too bad.” Carl smiled, resting his hand on the small indoor tree that grew next to the chair in which he sat. “We were just going to have a drink ourselves.”

“Oh, I can stand another one. I want to change though. My clothes, that is. I’ll join you in a moment. Will you make me an Old-fashioned, Mother? No, don’t. Have Dad make it. You can’t make cocktails—very well, that is.”

When she had gone, Carl smiled expectantly at Rose, who was gazing at him in the same way.

Finally she said, “You see what I mean?”

He nodded, although of course he couldn’t as yet see at all. What was there to see, for the naked eye? Just a high-spirited girl. But beneath that, the things Max Kaufman had told him which even Mrs. Kaufman wasn’t supposed to know.

“You should try not to worry about little things,” he told her. “There are always enough big things to bother us.”

Rose nodded and called, “Justin,” and waited awkwardly until he came. She had never got used to calling for the servants and continuing her conversation normally until they appeared. Mimi and Justin had not as yet become integrated into Rose’s scheme of things. Justin made the cocktails while Rose fussed with the tree that Carl’s hand had disarranged.

“There’s so much I want to ask you,” she said when she returned to her chair, “but I hardly know how. I’m not an educated woman—Oh, Max, there you are!”

“Not an educated woman,” Max said, shaking Carl’s hand. “They kept her in fourth grade so long that new students used to bring her apples, thinking she was the teacher…. How are you, Dr. Warschauer?”

“Call me Carl, please, Max. I’m fine.”

“Eighth grade, not fourth,” Rose said. “He exaggerates a little. But I did have to go to work right after public school. I never got to high school.”

“So what, Rose? Neither did I, and this is bad?” Max’s gesture included the house, the gardens and almost anything beyond it in the immediate vicinity.

“No, that’s not what I mean. You … you know, you express yourself better than I do. I can’t say what I want to say sometimes.”

“You probably can, better than you imagine, Mrs. Kaufman. Try it.”

“So what is it that you want to say?” Max interrupted.

“There’s so much that Max and I wanted to talk to you about. About Elly, about Max’s brother and his gentile girl friend.”

Carl smiled. “That’s what I’m supposed to be here for. I want to know about these things.”

Max stood up and walked to the table near the wall. He freshened his drink and said, “I really don’t know if it’s my place to do anything about my brother Alec.”

“Doesn’t know if it’s his place. Dr. Warsch—Carl, Max supports him, so is it his place or not?”

“I mean about him and this girl Annette.”

Carl lighted a cigarette, thinking: I like this part of my profession a little
too
much. I’ve got to be careful. I’m not a psychiatrist.

“Of course,” he said. “Families are always concerned about marriages the same way as they are about births and deaths.” Thinking: If my father hadn’t married a gentile girl, would I have become a rabbi?

“You see, Max,” Rose said, “I told you!” Then, to Carl: “He was a little ashamed to talk about it in front of you.”

The low table in front of them was littered with ashes and cigarette papers. She brushed them into a neat little pile absently.

“Not ashamed,” Max protested. “I’m just very anxious to know that I’m doing the right thing. I used to think, When I have money everything will straighten out. And now I have, but there’s still the question of the right and the wrong thing to do.”