The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (18 page)

“Let it all go! I couldn’t care less!” Dodo suddenly exclaimed. “I miss having someone to wash out my underwear more than I miss our marble entrance hall. Money, not beauty, is what I mourn.” To her, it was more tedious to have to wash a coffee cup than to be forced to wear a tattered dinner dress. In these preferences Dodo showed a clear and terrifying grasp of reality. She understood that the dirty coffee cup represented an effort. A frayed dress was simply itself. It did not ask anything of her except the nerve to wear it, and that nerve Dodo had in abundance.

Clarence did not speak during this nostalgic moment. His silences were ordinarily well considered; there was a lurking, impressive withholding of approval in them. He knew when to let other people worry for fear they might be making fools of themselves; with a deep and greedy sense of drama he could sit nodding attentively and send a chill of apprehension through the speaker. In this case, though, his silence was not malicious, for, in truth, Clarence found Dodo endlessly engaging. His sensibility, his scholarly discipline, his obstinacy — it was almost a form of genius the way he could bring all these to bear upon the thin, reddish woman sitting across from him. He felt, somehow, a vague but genuine sympathy with this frayed and yet luxurious person. Already he was busily informing his conscience that Dodo had an honesty, a candor, and a rigid simplicity of emotion that he found more elegant and admirable than Henrietta’s cleverness. Dodo was certainly not smart, and she was not kind. She was profoundly incapable of that greatness of sacrifice or purity of feeling at whose throne Clarence worshipped and in whose name he criticized and sighed over most of his acquaintances. But Clarence decided to find Dodo majestically produced, gloriously out of date, even historically significant. No, not that, not significant, he amended his thoughts, but socially expressive in a small and interesting way. She was ridiculous, like many a genuine article; she was a Chicago Babcock, helpless, proud, paralyzed by her self-esteem and bemused by the decline of her fortunes. Her clear eyes and pink skin reminded him of portraits of German princesses. Her long, pale fingernails were adorned with coral polish; on one haughty finger there was a splendid emerald ring, telling of days past and lost treasure hoards. There was a runner in her stocking, an affecting thinness to her ankles, a whiff of sachet clinging to the dress of purple silk.

Clarence was, he liked to say, “some kind of a Socialist.” Still, he did not approve of what he called “Socialist provincialism”; he freely admitted the possibility of charm, the capacity for suffering, in all classes. Thus, it was almost to his credit, he believed, to take a tolerant, worldly view of Dodo.

As a young girl, Dodo had spent several years in Italy, living in an expensive
pensione
in Florence. She never managed to meet the eligible Englishman who should have entered her life, conquering her with his vanity and his pedigree. She did not even manage to return to America with an attractive, penniless Italian of noble birth. It was not that she sought and did not find. She did not seek and was not found. Dodo had studied singing, but her interest in singing had gradually declined, leaving as a mark of its previous existence only a quantity of vehement opinion. As her passion for the art and the hopes of her youth diminished, they had been replaced by dissatisfaction with other voices and with modern music. Now, at dinner at the Nesbitts’, she found her days as a voice student another topic for reminiscence. “I was a mezzo,” she explained, giving to the middle register in which nature had placed her voice a romantic, elusive significance. Then, with the authority of a retired diva, she turned and said to Clarence with dazzling irrelevance, “
The Rake’s Program
, or whatever that phony concoction was called — I couldn’t, and never shall, find the courage to hear it through. Nowadays you can put anything over by a little publicity in the right places. The Russians, in my opinion, have no feeling for the voice. They understand only the violin.”

Clarence listened, and allowed an expression of gentle amusement to pass over his features. He thought there was considerable beauty in the clarity of Dodo’s chagrined countenance.

“Dodo, dear,” Willard said as they left the table, “your intransigence in this other-directed world we live in is a delightful curiosity.”

“I can’t imagine what you mean,” Dodo said, smiling girlishly. “I simply state my opinion. Nothing very original about that.”

Willard Nesbitt did not like to offer his guests alcohol after dinner, and so at his parties there was always this period of pause and hesitation, and even a bit of discomfort, because his guests were likely to wonder suddenly if Nesbitt did not regret the whole affair. And he did, indeed, often give the clearest indication that he wished the evening were over. By not drinking after dinner, Willard managed to avoid dull, headachy mornings and lazy, worthless days. His ambitions were limitless; there was not enough time for all he wanted to do. His abrupt seizures of boredom and restlessness were symptoms of his ambition and of his sense that time was running out and fame fickle and hard to command. He enjoyed social life, and yet he felt himself best suited to the formal occasion, to the meetings and councils of public life, to an existence of decisions, addresses, cameras, and microphones. He had had all too much of the unbuttoned, cozy, secure little world of the university.

Nesbitt’s restlessness, as the evening went on, offended Clarence, who took it for what it was, since he understood his colleague very well, and yet felt an exception should be made in his own case. His sense of personal affront was quickly translated into a generalization: Nesbitt’s longing for the world stage was an example of the increasing commercialization and superficiality of academic life.

Clarence, a bachelor and only thirty-eight, was nevertheless a lover of things as they once were. Everything seemed to him to have been subtly degraded, from the quality of bread to the high-school curriculum. Violent feelings of disappointment, exhausting worries about the future of culture, had a fierce dominion over Clarence’s existence. He was so fully and abjectly under the tyranny of these feelings that the feelings themselves were in his own mind mistaken for “work.” When he was angry with a colleague, defeated in a committee meeting, dismayed by the poor preparation of the students, these experiences seemed to him to be his job. They were much too devastating and severe for him to take lightly. In judging his extremity of emotion, he found it simply an example of his greater diligence and dedication, his superiority to the mechanics being turned out by the graduate schools. Clarence cared, he suffered, he worried. Nesbitt’s undersecretary of state airs and his desire to be an important figure in the intellectual world seemed to his critic, Clarence, to be a slighting of the great career of education.

Across the room, cool and smiling, sat Dodo Babcock. That schizophrenic, dangerous serenity, Clarence thought. Childishness, indifference, greed, and empty vanity; Clarence counted them off on his fingers — the faults of upper-class women. Yet out of nowhere came the answer that he had the opposite qualities in superabundance. He was careful, liberal, idealistic, and so the arrogant, self-loving, little-girl character of Dodo appealed to him. He tilted his head so that he might overhear what she was saying to Henrietta without interrupting his own conversation with a drowsy-looking Willard.

“This heavy reliance on Freud may prove embarrassing a few decades from now — even one decade from now,” Clarence was saying. “I don’t think people quite realize the extent of this influence. It is like a gas that has mixed into the natural atmosphere. Of course, a great mind and great work would make incalculable differences in special fields — in this case, in psychology and character analysis. But history, sociology, religion, architecture! I am reminded of the seriousness with which the Victorians took phrenology.”

“You can’t honestly mean to imply the two things are comparable in any sense,” Willard said, languidly taking a cigarette from a Chinese box on the table.

“No, I certainly do not. I think Freud is immense, don’t mistake me. But still, some of the details, some of the literalness, the use to which he has been put, disturbs me. Even the greatest intellectual events are often distorted by overearnest followers. There are fashions, exaggerations, mistakes here, as elsewhere. We don’t know exactly what will remain, after all, of Freudianism — what its real contribution will turn out to be.”

“Naturally, naturally,” Willard said, without enthusiasm.

Clarence heard Henrietta say to Dodo, “Your parents were truly glamorous, and I am not one to use that word lightly.”

“Daddy was the most wonderful person I have ever known,” Dodo said. “He was strong, clever, good-natured. He knew how to have a good time, how to be gay, how to give people pleasure.” It seemed to Clarence that Dodo blushed when she saw him looking at her.

“Who are you?” Dodo suddenly said to him. “Are you terribly brilliant, and all that?”

“Yes, I must confess I am,” Clarence replied, with an elaborate flourish of self-mockery. “I am very frightening with my great brilliance.”

Dodo did not laugh. She was as free of irony as a doll. A mind like that, Clarence thought giddily, lives by sheer superstition. Dodo’s eyes remained upon him. She was archaic, quaint, and yet not really eccentric. Clarence decided it would be agreeable if she turned out to love Jane Austen, or even Trollope. But his sanity soon returned and he sullenly reminded himself that privileged persons no longer had hobbies like Jane Austen. Daddy Babcock would never have spent an evening — or an hour — with Roman history. The Babcocks’ culture, such as it was, was thin and vulgar, and prodigiously indolent. Clarence’s irritation mounted, but it did not center on Dodo so much as on her group — or what was once her group. Dodo’s haughty, grim helplessness saved her. The old purple dress and the runner in her stocking somehow brought her back to the possible. At least she was a failure! And at the same time a challenge, subtly touching the vein of competition that throbbed in Clarence’s soul. The smile Dodo gave him was sweet, hesitant, wondering. He observed that he and she were not at ease with each other, and this signified to him the possibility of sexual drama — the painful and promising period of courtship and discovery. Clarence felt bold. He said, in a harsh, uncaring voice, “Do you like chamber music, Miss Babcock?”

“I adore it,” Dodo said, clasping her hands and looking at Willard and Henrietta as if she had scored a triumph and meant to be congratulated. They gave no sign of encouragement, but Dodo let the disappointment pass. She did not know that though she had been asked with Clarence for the evening, she was not particularly asked to admire him.

“Would you like to go with me to hear three fine instrumentalists perform some trios next week?” said Clarence. “The ‘Archduke,’ for one, and some Mozart, I think. The full program escapes me.”

“I’d adore it,” Dodo said.

“Good!” Clarence said.

Henrietta looked at him with a twisted grin. Willard coughed. Clarence now felt he could leave the Nesbitts to their postmortem conversation. He could leave dramatically, on his own terms, giving as fit payment for the evening’s invitation the little bit of confusion, wonder, and mystery that his determination to continue the friendship with Dodo meant for the Nesbitts. Looking at his watch, he exclaimed gaily that it was a quarter to eleven. With great gentleness and delicacy, he offered Dodo a taxi ride, which she accepted. The Nesbitts were quiet.

At the door, Clarence took his time. He paused reflectively, to round out his conversation with Willard. “There is certainly a question of just how much encouragement we want to give the new era in education, which I have called the Divinity School Era,” he said slowly. “I, for one, am not absolutely certain that it is an advance on the Teachers College Age.”

“Perhaps not,” Willard said limply. “The only thing that can be said for it is that a lot of persons will be forced to take New Testament Greek.”

“Some comfort but not enough,” Clarence said, giving his arm to Dodo and disappearing down the stairs.

Alone, the Nesbitts were crestfallen. “That was sort of boring,” Henrietta said. She poured herself a brandy and shrugged when Willard refused one.

“Clarence is terribly irritating,” Willard said savagely. “Somehow, I keep forgetting just how provoking his personality can be. He’s too cold and at the same time too intense — a tiresome, disturbing combination. I don’t know why I ever had the dull idea of having him here. We didn’t even
owe
him! Of course, no one owes him, because he never invites anyone.”

“What did you think of Dodo?” Henrietta said, dreamily sipping her brandy. “She seemed delighted with Clarence — at least delighted for
her
. She’s not very demonstrative, but the poor girl is susceptible.
Quite
, I can tell you.”

“I thought Dodo was the same,” Willard said crossly. “But I must say that if she is attracted to Clarence, then she has deteriorated since the last time I saw her. She used to have more sense. It would be absolutely unbearable if that ass Anderson started to escort Dodo about. I thought it was very speedy of him to make the engagement for that damned concert right here, the first meeting.”

“I don’t know that I agree,” Henrietta said, her eyes glinting mischievously. The brandy was having its effect. “Dodo is lonely. She must be. And Clarence is plausible to a degree that is positively frightening.”

“He’d only be using that foolish Dodo to vex us. I know him! I don’t relish the idea of Clarence as a part of the family, let me tell you — not even as a part by nothing more than friendship with Dodo. Not even that! The whole thing is exasperating!”

“Just exactly why, pet?” Henrietta insisted, with a bit of hoarseness, giving her husband that look of bone-and-blood superiority he had learned to dread. “Dodo is not likely to marry anyone — at least so far as I can predict. You can never tell about what are called the middle years, though. Of course, she turned down a number of quite soundly eligible persons in her very young days. And don’t you forget it!”