The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (23 page)

Goddesses in flowing, liquid dress, winged helmets, carrying sheaves of grain; kinky-haired Medusas, so slim and dark; and the beautiful Athenas, makers of dresses and perfumes and rouge and nail polish in all the hues. Now the earth tones and soon again a stirring of pastels light as petals on the grass. Goddesses on the arm of plain, unimpressive gods, running to shortness, but shrewd as trolls down in the ground where the minerals are or looking under the waves where the viscid oils lie with all their interest shaming the ladies’ little vials on the dressing table.

Under the moon the taxi makes its way through the dark park and a cassette of Rachmaninoff passes perhaps over the buried imprint of his own footsteps. The gaseous piano, fortissimo, sounds like a new invention as it executes a sudden, jolting pedaling at the stoplight.

Here, back once more awaiting the appearance of the nightman, my neighbor can be seen walking her dog. A snub-nosed animal, the dog, with a strange dry body like tanned hide, a dog such as you can see wandering in poor countries, on the back streets of the West Indies. Maybe it was such a dog that killed Verrazano when he went on from the East River and the Hudson to the Caribbean; such a dog and not the natives at all. Well, as we say today, that is what you pay for New York City.

Nod to the neighbor. Friend is the correct word in this case because, as everyone has noted, neighbor has no special resonance in Manhattan. Oh, blight, the same cannot be said for neighborhood. And it cannot be said of the peculiar, blinding possibility of the painter and his wife in their large, light apartment on Seventh Avenue in midtown where they live in an anxious stasis similar to the comfortable house arrest offered to the families of the deposed.

The painter possesses an unfashionable and genuinely modest talent. He and his wife are soon to be sixty years old and of him it could be said that he has been too well-brought-up in New Haven and Yale to quit. They have very little cash and yet they spin around like a top, dizzied by the remarkable whirl of their assets. Their apartment (indeed, indeed a steal at $300,000 everyone says) and the small house they have had for thirty years in the town of Gloucester, Mass. (worth, worth, you better believe, Sir, at least $150,000). Remember the view and the spread of the rocky harbor and the memory of Fitzhugh Lane and so on and so on.

On Monday mornings the wife goes down to the basement with her laundry and sits through the cycles of washing and drying with a nodding patience. He often puts on his Irish woolen cap and his tweed jacket and with some abashment takes the shopping cart out of the closet and goes off with a list to the supermarket. If they speak of all-year-round in Gloucester there is defeat in it — the dead winter, the sailing boats hauled in, the nudity flown. It would not do, no, even though they are little engaged in the city’s art affairs. The painter had his friends who were older than he and are now gone, such men as Edwin Dickinson and Leon Kroll. Pleasant to be a son and that is what he still feels when he goes off to the Childe Hassam exhibition at the National Academy on Fifth Avenue.

The painter studies, has studied and yet after thirty-five years the landscape of his heart is still the New Haven and Fisher’s Island of his youth. A gallery on Newbury Street in Boston has some of his paintings of shingled summer houses and girls in white on the lawn. They are brought out and sometimes they touch a buyer’s heart, like an old photograph, and so there is money from time to time — not much because the sentiments of the buyer are clouded by the fact that the painter’s name is not known, except
here
and
there
, a curious fate for a name. Perhaps there is a little money from legacies, very likely for someone carefully brought up. Anyway, he is known to his brother, a lawyer with an insurance firm in Hartford, as my brother who is an artist and lives in New York City; and his wife is spoken of by her sister in Florida as the brave one who married an artist and lives in New York. So they go on in the ideal, gently backward, greatly puzzled by the cost of things and the mirage of assets...Off to sleep, genteel couple. The city is yours.

My friend and the dog go to the other side of the street. Not up to a great deal of talk at midnight. Yet how often she is on the street in the late night, sometimes at one end of the block and then again at the other. It is troubling. When she goes off to work the next morning, the dog howls if a footstep comes near the door of her apartment. He is said to be very quiet when Garland, such is her name, is at home.

In bed at last, ready to read. “Five women in nightgowns were shot in a damp field.” No, not the morning paper. It is the Russian Revolution, St. Petersburg, in Victor Serge’s
The Conquered City
. The next line explains: “After the killings the men had taken an hour to remove their red stars and sew on the nationalist cockades.”

New York. Even when you have been here so long, can it be your autobiography? Not the scene of first love, disillusionment, parents, family, formation. Everything instead is confirmation. Has my reservation, my appointment been confirmed? Perhaps yes and maybe not.

The cold winds blow from the north, from empty space with fir trees like great chandeliers of ice. Then the hellish season and the water vapors as heavy as a fur cloak in the summer air. So, if you come from Siberia you may one day be hit by a blast of memory and feel the cold of an icy cave; but soon you can walk about the dusty street and scarcely forget San Juan stifling in the breeze of a hundred torrid melodies.

“The City Hall, in the Southern part of Manhattan Island, is in lat. 40° 42' 43" N. and long. 74° 0' 3" W. Average number of hours of sunshine ranges from 150 in November to 271 in June.” That was many years ago, but some things don’t change. And what is meant by hours of sunshine?

See the photograph of the grandmother in Kiev, wearing a fur hat; and large areas of the city with slave memories, rebellious fires on Minetta Street; and sugarcane and favelas under the Southern Cross. This is not Berlin or Paris and we are not a folk here. Here it is something else.

The Croats are furious from time to time and throw a bomb. It seems that we should liberate them. Who else?

It’s all over, Boris.
That was the last line of the dramatic crime serial that preceded the evening news. As for the news, after the fires and the gunshots, a victimless crime. It appears that a Columbia graduate student, or one once a graduate student, has stolen a 1630 edition of Galileo from a London library. When he tried to pass it on to a dealer there was a smart detective sitting behind the desk. Imperishable Galileo among the treasures of the earth. A Kazak rug, American rococo furniture attributed to Meeks, dolls, quilts, a diamond necklace — nothing out of stock at the auction houses.

When a dreadful crime takes place, the accused and the victim become for the time allotted them quite interesting and that is bad news for both. Biographers of soul and body arouse themselves — reveille. Off the researchers go to the reform school, seeking résumés, recommendations from psychiatrist and warden, plotting the flight of the spotted bird. If all goes well, all will go well; if not, beware. And here is the father of the accused opening the door with a shotgun in his hand. And somewhere else the mother, whose Mrs. has been followed by several names different from that borne by the accused. I haven’t heard from him in thirteen years. He’s not in trouble, is he? That is one genre, and the old frogs in the pond move about in a sluggish repetition.

Money and the natural wish for change, a nice change, occasionally require crime for the removal of the unchanging. A stir in the great mansion on the bluffs of a rich town in the Northeast and here a dozen tubs of blue agapanthus guard the sides of the driveway and the turf is as green and rich and imperishable as some vile shag on a bathroom floor. Three handsome cars are in the garage and the waves of the sea just beyond the light curtains of the master bedroom are as gratifying as waves of one’s own anywhere else in the world. The coast is not unlike Biarritz.

What a fool he or she, already so rich, was to fall under the domination of the law and what with the blue flowers and the silvered mirrors and the crime and the amphibious lawyers — what can vengeance be like when so miserably deserved? And out of the index cards and the coughing tapes your biography will be preserved and in this, having caught the public eye, you will be trapped in the universal, the toneless data. No matter. Many consolations. You will share this internment, the fatality of being interesting to someone, with generals, scientists, flamboyant artists, and other criminals. In a way you haven’t fared worse than Michelangelo.

Only writers have the possibility of autobiography, this singularity, this exercise of option by way of adjectives and paragraphs. No wonder statesmen and public figures need all the help they can get from the files, the recorded meetings, the secretaries and extraordinary machinery. For others, the unaided, there are aesthetic problems — what will “work.” My life would make a book, the hairdresser said. That is true, true. There is incident, suspense, narrative and then, too, there is the “I” and here the hairdresser insists that what went on there is nobody’s business.

There is some dispute about Rousseau. Perhaps he did not abandon his children to the foundling hospital. What a base lie. Not to have abandoned the children, all five of them. But of course he sent the children to the foundling hospital. Everything we know about him and Thérèse Levasseur makes it “work.” That is if there actually were children born. There’s always that.

A bit of my past nudged the present a month or so ago. There was a time when I used to run into people from home on the streets of New York and members of my family used to come in on the C&O and we would go to
Oklahoma!
and to the Latin Quarter, a large Hungarian sort of place with a large menu featuring the splendid oxymoron, baked Alaska, and a long, florid floor show. But no more, not for what you might call that sort of American.

A couple from Louisville telephoned me and spoke of the extraordinary decision they had made. They had sold their house on a street named Keithshire Drive. The old Indian names of Chinoe Road and the countrified Tate’s Creek were never in fashion in the suburbs. They had sold their house and come here to New York to an apartment on York Avenue, and for life. The wife is forty-five and the husband is forty-seven. Fred and Dorothy. Fred worked for one of the Louisville distilleries, J.W. Dant, and he has some kind of position with the New York offices of another whiskey producer. They call this a hardship post, he said, but we are pleased as punch.

Hardship post. I have heard that phrase before, from a United States foreign-service officer. He was referring to Calcutta. So, welcome Fred and Dorothy.

They are in three white rooms on the twelfth floor and they have brought with them, have transferred, their sideboard and gateleg tables and corner cupboard. A mahogany whatnot stands in the hall and on it are fluted bottles, saucers from Czechoslovakia, and “Mama’s cut glass.” How happy they appeared, how pleased to be going up and down the gold-flecked elevator, which lets out on long, narrow corridors with gold-flecked carpeting.

We sat together drinking bourbon and names from years ago came into the conversation. Bob and Jack and Nancy and their stories, which were for the most part not out of luck. Everyone was pretty good. And just then a surly man rang the doorbell, a man who had been announced at apartment 12F and yet rang the bell of apartment 12H in error. Somehow all the bells and corridors and letters of the alphabet bore down in their awesome multiplication and a silence spread over our recital of place-names and streets and the little villages at home named Athens, Paris, and Versailles that lie between the larger towns,

And now a phonograph was playing overhead and the bass rhythm was like the light hammering of many nails in sequence, as if putting down a carpet.

The husband walked with me down the corridor to the elevator and on the way someone was playing phrases of Maria Callas’s “Casta Diva,” playing over and over, picking up the arm and putting it down with a scratch. A new world, Fred? Yes, it is, that it is. Now he bent toward me and it was true he still had the look, the look of fraternities and the football team and tall boys from the Kentucky mountains slipping the ball into the basket, and Coach Rupp, all of it. And also back there in the apartment in Dorothy’s eyes there were lilacs and a pair of cardinals caught on the bush for a moment in the Japanese style, and fields of tobacco plants and horses standing in the dry winter fields.

Now, listen, Fred said. Dorothy has been in a life-threatening situation, but all is well, all is well.

Ah, York Avenue, the thoroughfare of hospitals. These two, he with his fair husband-face and she with her fair wife-face, were two intrepid warriors appearing out of the sky like defiant airplanes rushing through the stars, and as they said, for life.

Downstairs the garden of rocks and undying foliage in the lobby, the mirrors, the crystal chandelier, and the radio on the doorman’s desk playing Caribbean music. Nothing amiss here. All bright and warm and, yes, filled with hope. In front of New York Hospital the limousines stopped at the entrance and then went on to look for an empty waiting spot on the avenue. And nothing much else new from home.

What obstinacy in the air. A whole city built on obstinacy. Don’t yield. The schoolchildren with their satchels crossing the city when it is barely light on a winter morning — obstinate little roots. Some are in parochial-school uniforms, green stockings and plaid skirts, and they themselves are like little nuns, postulates, hanging on. Others are being bused to private schools. Children of professors, actors, lawyers, officials. And no matter how carelessly they are dressed in housepainter overalls or little-boy lumberjack costumes, there is no doubt they will be the inheritors of whatever there is — along with the others, loitering, wandering, disappearing under the turnstiles at the subway entrance, swiftly out of sight as the coin seller calls, Hey you, stop.