The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (25 page)

Majored in fine arts, Roger says. And then, looking up into the sky in which lights from so many rooms flicker like yellow stars, Roger drifts for a moment into a mesmerized, speculative mode. In the rooms, he says, he imagines miserable calculations in every head nodding off to sleep, figures added and subtracted, dreams of selling the very space that held the bed upon which the sleeper’s head restlessly lay in its blur of arithmetic. On the street, he has noticed that people keep turning around suddenly, as if future income taxes were brushing by, grazing coats like a pickpocket.

Lois returns, the gates clang before the darkened window, and as they start up the stairs of the tenement Roger ends his historical reverie. Those that are not inside counting up, he says, are outside making marks in indelible ink on every clean wall. Good night, good night.

Some days after, there is Roger at noon explaining things to the Hungarian woman who has for twenty-two years managed alone her dry-cleaning establishment and is now to be evicted in an imaginative glassy renovation which will add its signature to the old avenue’s petition of hope. Roger is saying: Landless peasants, that is what we are. Till the soil for centuries and then the messenger comes from St. Petersburg to say the master wants his hectares for an iron foundry.

The dry-cleaning woman says: Mr. Spiegel does not live in St. Petersburg but in Bay Ridge.

Roger, gregarious as a housefly, is not one asked to dinner at the home of his friends, although he presents a respectable bohemian appearance. He has not accumulated anything for social use and is no more fit for the inside of things than a flowering bush. The byways of life have captured him, even
captivated
his mind, and it is possible to think that his contentment comes from never having to set out the dishes, watch the oven, make drinks, freeze ice, have coffee cups ready and table chairs assembled. And his curiosity is disarming — harmless, quickly satisfied, unassuming, wide rather than deep. It is a sort of credulous, favorable curiosity and surrounds him like heat.

His memory for names is extraordinary. It is names he stores up out of the daily
Times
. Names of painters, names of sopranos, names of leftists and rightists, of murderers, of architects, of film directors, and, above all, the names of writers to go with their titles. These names lie on his brain, smothering it, like the blanketing of the acquisitions in his apartment. His cumulative index of dead and live souls, jangling bits of change with the pennies, nickels, and dimes of celebrity, often has a dampening effect on conversation and, being all-identifying information as it is, the terms of exchange cannot be agreed upon.

Obscure persons, those of some past accomplishment lying under the settled dust, are alarmed by Roger’s mysterious recognitions. They start in embarrassment, seeming to fear they have been picked out of the heap by mistake.

Aren’t you — — , author of — — ? Roger asks with perfect courtesy.

How did you recognize me?

To this Roger can only reply that in truth he does not know. And he is unprepared for the burden his keen eye, his genial salute represented to the modest, the shy, and also to the arrogant.

What is the noise in the back of The Pleiade? Like the sound of some smoothly running machine pleased to be doing its part. It is Roger and the great energy of his friendly, healthy, untroubled ways. Unaccountable exertions at the table in the back of the shop. Roger is typing away at an impressive speed, racing along as confidently as an alert stenographer in court. Behind him, stacked in neat black binders, are the thirteen novels he has written on the typewriter. During the slowness just before the dinner hour there he is, sitting straight and tall for the protection of his back during his labors. Coffee cools beside him, a cheeseburger waits in its wrapping paper. Clang, clang, clang! Loud, joyful clangs from his thick, strong fingers. In goes a sheet of paper to be greeted by the happy rhythmical clatter and soon with a quick, practiced twist out it comes with a very pleasant zing, and another page rolls in. Pure pleasure rattles through Roger’s body as the neat, perfectly typed pages pile up. What gladness in numbers: Chapter 7, page 210.

The pages arrive as if telephoned by the stack of index cards on the right, which contain, sketched in Roger’s fine script, the characters who are sending the messages.

From an early work: Desmond, thirty-two, in the O.S.S. on the European front, World War II. English by birth but American citizen after marriage to Melissa, proper Bostonian background. These two were to be involved in a tangle of unbelievable but nevertheless predictable complication.

The gathering ledgers — for that is what they appear to be — ledgers with indecipherable figures noting some forgotten transaction, have seen the creation of disaster plots, cancer plots, celebrity-scandal plots, regional plots, international plots. But there is nothing at all in the stacks of black binders of the avant-garde, nothing of the beloved discordance of modernism, that is the pride of the bookshelves, the consolation of the proprietor. The violent, ecstatic typing — so like a fantastic, rejuvenating regime of arcane exercises. The pile of crisp pages sometimes goes out to the world in envelopes, and the return causes no discouragement.

The French scholar, a lonely man and a terrible snob with an almost paranoid resentment of certain French works in current esteem, among them the poetry of Francis Ponge and the essays of Cioran, often says: I do not understand this deranged typing. It is not hope of fame, of money, or even of publication. It is not anything that can be known.

And he tells of seeing Roger once in a mood of despair as he sat ready to attack the keys. A work in the autobiographical mode was planned, but a painful interruption, a stiffening, a paralysis struck Roger after only a dozen or so pages. Mournfully, he appealed to his reliable fingers, the faithful engines, but they could not be urged to move along. At last, he said: The “I” is not for me. The sheet came out, the black leather cover was placed over the typewriter with the solemnity of defeat — a burial.

Disquieting events at The Pleiade, in December. Maureen returns suddenly from Troy, looking beautiful, with her tranquil eyes, her short curls, and wearing a graceful skirt of Indian cotton.

Sprung, Roger says.

Now Maureen sits at the back of the shop with Lois, also in her full beauty, if somehow edging into dishevelment, save for a new pair of expensive light-blue leather boots, stitched with patterns of pink roses.

They might be Roger’s daughters. And what are they? Mistresses? They and the sulky despot, Jenny, whose reign, before Maureen, tormented the walls, accused the shelves, menaced with frowns the old New Directions paperbacks and the first hundred titles of Anchor Books, which Roger, knight of perfect faith, had assembled.

Jenny, in her forties, had come to Roger like a message in a bottle, floating from Yugoslavia, where she was born, to London, where she was briefly married to a second cousin of Roger’s, and on to New York with the address of The Pleiade in her hand.

Where indeed is Jenny?

New Jersey, Roger says. Relatives. Serbs chanting folktales from the old oral tradition.

Not one of his friends thinks Maureen or Lois is a mistress. It is unimaginable because of the presence of some cheerful absence in Roger, his blameless peculiarity of not seeming to have an interior. For all his curiosity, he is not inclined to analysis and detail, and those about whom he is curious come into his view as traveling objects. It is as if he were to look up and say: That one is blue with yellow stripes and this one is red and black. Except for the tyrannical Jenny. The violinist believes there might have been an affair in that corner.

And why does he think so? Her deprecating ill-humor, for one thing, he answers.

The two girls, Maureen and Lois, were not altogether friendly and took up more room than the shop could bear. They did not make change, did not advise about the existence of a title, never opened the interesting pages of
Books in Print
. Roger himself swept out in the morning, and at night, often the wrong one, took his huge plastic bags of rubbish to the curb for collection. Two girls might have been six girls, and the multiplication sent Roger into a state of mind unusual for him, a state of unhappiness and vexation. The unbalancing scheme seemed to demand something from him, but he was not clear just what that something might be.

It is not as if they were down and out, he would say with a sigh. He repeated this again and again, and although the girls were only a few feet away they did not appear to be listening.

Both girls were indeed cherished by their confused families. They received money and mail, letters filled with encouragement, letters grateful that they were in beguiling, promising New York City in order to get on with their lives. Their hometowns, scenes of disappointment and constriction, were not suitable for advancement. Lois had found early that in her own Pittsburgh there was nothing happening. The two had met in a private sanatorium and each had made her way to therapeutic New York and to the Pleiade hospice. And here they were, in a state of becoming.

The overpopulation left Roger gasping for air, unable to recover his stolen placid breathing. The unmoving freight, stalled, lay in his path, defying all the tools his accepting nature had at hand. He would find the two silently gazing at the store’s landscape and limply he would suggest: Shoo! Take a walk.

We are not twins, Maureen would answer. Let Lois take the walk.

The Pleiade is downed by melancholy until Christmas, when Lois is lifted up by holiday sentiment and one morning abandons the bookshop and the apartment for the despised Pittsburgh.

She will not be back, Maureen says. It turns out that Lois’s brother walked up and down in front of The Pleiade, entered the challenging stairway of the old tenement, looked in wonder like a detective on a case at Roger, Maureen, the dog, the unkempt and the fashionable customers, and decided that the setting was not promising for Lois’s career. With the help of Christmas he led her to take up the trail back home.

The empty chair reassured, space opened up in Roger’s heart once more and its steady, comfortable beating returned. The typewriter clanged from four until six in the afternoon. New classics were magically restored after the cruelty of time had spent itself. The tides flowed and Roger swam.

It is Christmas at The Pleiade. Roger’s days soar as he dispenses, in the spirit of charity baskets, the gifts of the world. Storytellers from Africa, epics from Latin America, painful gutting rituals from Japan, women poets from the Russia of the twenties — the 1920s, the period of his first passions, now a hallowed battlefield filled with noble headstones. Suicides, early death, transfiguration, words, words, words, in all the tongues of the earth. Roger’s head, with its wrinkled sandy waves lapping on the shore of his brow, bobs up and down in time to the sacred music.

On the block, the sepulcher of the old fruit market is now a mausoleum of oak cabinets and kitchen tables from the back porches of the Middle West. Taste itself seems to be laughing in the street.

In January, Maureen dimmed and faded away. The dark star of Jenny, with her glimmering scowl, ascended without notice. Remarks burst from her like bullets. He is a toadstool, she would say of Roger in a loud gunfire.

After a pause of shock, Roger found his aim. You see, I am a
cavaliere servente
, he cried out gaily, calling upon page 1 of
The Charterhouse of Parma
.

Jenny gradually displayed a few marks of chastening. An unwholesome strain of choleric domesticity invaded her thoughts, a lesson learned. She had turned a corner, but not the one that led to cooking and housekeeping. She was making her way, as if by a private radar, to the interests of ownership. Swift, proprietary gleamings, a sense of things. Her eyes surveyed the books, the collections, like a guard with his flashlight making the midnight rounds. Stirrings in the blood, storage plans for winter, gathering potatoes in the cellar; she was getting older.

Sometimes one would see her studying a piece of brass or old silver brought down from the apartment. A pawnbroker’s stare, cynical smile, and shrug of feigned indifference. Roger did not speak of this alteration in her attention, but found relief in the fact that she stayed upstairs a good deal, pushing objects from one corner to another, making promising groupings, looking for the right screw for a hole, an old curve that would welcome a stray rosette of gold leaf. No mending, no polishing. In her fitful accounting all was equal and she might have been engaged in a nightmare dialogue between buyer and seller. Here is the missing leg, in perfect shape; here is the piece that completes the red tail of the dragon on the green china plate; here is volume IV. Sorting out, Roger said.

In the middle of March, our lawyer friend who played the violin and read Kleist and Novalis died. The death dug its teeth into Roger’s soft heart and he looked backward to remember that the friend had not been in The Pleiade for a few months and had for the past year appeared frail and thin. At the Riverside Chapel, we mourned this death of a hero, with his antique passions, as they seemed, his poets known by heart and whose lives were shorter than his own.

He has gone their way early, Roger said in a throttle of tears.

Nothing in the memorial of all this. Instead, accomplishments unknown to us, the accretion of a short, handsome wife and the production of two tall daughters. They haven’t got him right, Roger grieved as the tributes went on with their office jokes, mishaps on the tennis court, charitable contributions, and helping hands for the young.

The Pleiade has lost a star and yet, diminished, it faces another spring. Roger himself seems to be adorned with fresh innocence as he watches the begonias and forced gardenias expel the potted chrysanthemums and Jerusalem cherries from the sidewalk outside the florist’s. The heavens are clear for a whole week. There is ballet at the State Theatre and yet another at the opera house. Hardly a night passes without an author to be recognized and to receive a murmured approbation, as if a breeze has passed the ear whispering, beloved, here you are at last.