The Ghost Writer (17 page)

Lonoff was now making the cautious trek down the stairs.

“Hope, this is playacting. And pure indulgence.”

“
I am going
,” she told him. “You’re not going anywhere. Put the bag down.”

“No! I am going to Boston! But don’t worry—she knows where everything is. It’s practically home to her already. No precious time will be lost. She can hang her things back in the closet and be ready to begin boring you as soon as I’m out the door. You won’t even notice the difference.”

Amy, unable to watch any longer, looked down into her lap, prompting Hope to say, “Oh, she thinks otherwise. Of course she does, I’ve seen her fondling each sheet of each draft of each. story. She minks with her it will all be the religion of art up here. Oh, will it ever! Let her try to please you, Manny! Let her serve as the backdrop for your thoughts for thirty-five years. Let her see how noble and heroic you are by the twenty-seventh draft. Let her cook you wonderful meals and light candles for your dinner. Let her get everything ready to make you happy and then see the look on your stone face when you come in at night and sit down at the table. A surprise for dinner? Oh, my dear girl, that is merely his due for a miserable day of bad writing.
That
gets no rise out of him. And candles in the old pewter holders? Candles, after all these years? How poignant of her, he thinks, how vulgar, what a wistful souvenir of yesterday’s tea rooms. Yes, have her run hot baths for your poor back twice a day, and then go a week without being talked to—let alone being touched in bed. Ask him in bed, ‘What is it, dear, what’s the matter?’ But of course you know all too well what the matter is—you know why he won’t hold you, why he doesn’t even know you’re
there
. The fiftieth draft!”

That is enough,” said Lonoff. “Quite thorough, very accurate, and enough.”

“Fondling those papers of yours! Oh, she’ll see! I got fondled more by strangers on the rush-hour subway during two months in 1935 than I have up here in the last twenty years! Take off your coat, Amy—you’re staying: The classroom daydream has come true! You get the creative writer—and I get to go!”

“She’s not staying,” Lonoff said, softly again. “You’re staying.”

“Not for thirty-five more years of this!”

“Oh, Hopie.” He put a hand out to her face, where the tears were still falling.

“I’m going to Boston! I’m going to Europe! It’s too late to touch me now! I’m taking a trip around the world and never coming back! And you,” she said, looking down at Amy in her chair, “you won’t go anywhere. You won’t see anything. If you even go out to dinner, if once in six months you get him to accept an invitation to somebody’s home, then it’ll be even worse—then for the hour before you go your life will be misery from his kvetching about what it’s going to be like when those people start in with their ideas. If you dare to change the pepper mill, he’ll ask what’s the matter, what was wrong with the old one? It takes three months for him just to get used to a new brand of soap. Change the soap and he goes around the house sniffing, as though something dead is on the bathroom sink instead of just a bar of Palmolive. Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up, their friends must stay away until four—There is his religion of art, my young successor rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction
out
of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!”

Amy pushed herself up out of her chair and put on the childish hat with the ball on the end of the tassel. Looking past Hope, she said to Lonoff, “I’m going.”

“
I’m
going,” Hope cried.

To me Amy said, “I’m leaving now, if you’d like a ride to town.”

“
I’m
leaving now,” Hope told her. “Take that silly hat off! School is over! You are twenty-seven! This is officially your house!”

“It’s not, Hope,” Amy said, beginning at last to cry. “It’s yours.”

And so broken and pathetic did she seem in that moment of capitulation that I thought, But of course last night is not the first time she’s sat cuddled up in his lap—but of course, he’s seen her unclothed before. They have been lovers! Yet when I tried to imagine E. I. Lonoff stripped of his suit and on his back, and Amy naked and astride his belly, I couldn’t, no more than any son can.

I
don’t think I could keep my wits about me, teaching such beautiful and gifted and fetching girls.

Then you shouldn’t do it.

Oh, Father, is this so, were you the lover of this lovesick, worshipful, displaced daughter half your age? Knowing full well you’d never leave Hope? You succumbed too? Can that be? You?

The bed? I had the bed.

Convinced now that that wasn’t so—that nobody, nobody, has ever really had the bed—I persisted nonetheless in believing that it was.

“You do as I say!” Hope again, ordering Amy. “You stay and look after him! He cannot stay here alone!”

“But I won’t be alone,” Lonoff explained to her. “You know that I won’t be alone. Enough, enough now,-for your sake, too. This is all because we’ve had visitors. This is all because somebody new stayed the night. There was company, we all had breakfast, and you got excited. Now everybody’s going away—and this came over you. You got lonely. You got frightened. Everybody understands.”

“Look, Manny, she is the child—don’t you treat me like the child! She is now the child-bride here—”

But before Hope could describe her in further detail, Amy was past her and out the front door.

“Oh, the little bitch!” cried Hope.

“Hope,” said Lonoff. “Don’t. Not that routine.”

But he did not move to stop her as she too ran from the house, carrying her bag.

I said, “Do you want me—to do anything?”

“No, no. Let it run its course.”

“Okay.”

“Calm down, Nathan. One at a time we are about to calm down.” Then we heard Hope scream. I followed him to the front window, expecting to see blood on the snow. Instead, there was Hope, seated in a drift only a few feet from the house, while Amy’s car was slowly backing out of the car shed. But for the billowing exhaust fumes everything out of doors was gleaming. It was as though not one but two suns had risen that morning.

Hope watched, we watched. The car turned in the driveway. Then it was out onto the road and gone.

“Mrs. Lonoff’s fallen down.”

“I see that,” he said sadly.

We watched her struggle to her feet. Lonoff rapped on the frosted window with his knuckles.. Without bothering to look back up to the house, Hope retrieved the overnight bag from where it lay on the path and proceeded with cautious tiny steps to the car shed, where she got into the Lonoff’s Ford. But the car only whined when she tried to start it; effort after effort produced only that most disheartening of winter sounds.

“The battery,” he explained.

“Maybe she flooded it.”

Again she tried: same results.

“No, the battery,” he said. “It’s been happening all month.

You charge it up and it makes no difference.”

“You may need a new one,” I said, since that was what he wanted to talk about.

“I shouldn’t. The car is practically brand-new. Where does it go but into town?”

We waited, and finally Hope got out of the car.

“Well, good thing you got a lemon,” I said.

“From whose point of view, Nathan?” lie walked around to the hallway and opened the front door. I continued to watch from the window.

“Hope,” he called. “Come in now. That’s it.”

“No!”

“But how can I live alone?”

“The boy can live with you.”

“Don’t be silly. The boy is going. Come inside now. If you slip again, you’re going to get hurt. Darling, it’s slippery, it’s cold as hell—”

“I’m going to Boston.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’ll walk if I have to.”

“Hope, it’s twenty degrees. Come back in and get warm and calm down. Have some tea with me. Then we’ll talk about moving to Boston.”

Here, with her two hands, she hurled the overnight bag into the snow at her feet. “Oh, Manny, you wouldn’t move into Stockbridge because the streets are paved, so how could I ever get you to Boston? And what difference would it be in Boston anyway? You’d be just the same—you’d be worse. How could you concentrate in Boston, with all those people swarming around? There, somebody might even ask you something about your work!”

“Then maybe the best bet is to stay here.”

“Even here you can’t think if I so much as make toast in the kitchen—I have to catch my toast before it pops up so you won’t be disturbed in the study!”

“Oh, Hopie,” he said, laughing a little, “that’s overdoing things. For the next thirty-five years just make your toast and forget about me.”

“I
can’t
.”

“Learn,” he said sternly.

“No!” Picking up the bag, she turned and started down the driveway. Lonoff closed the door. I watched from the window to see that she stayed on her feet. The snow had been banked so high by the town plow the night before that when she turned into the road she immediately passed out of sight. But then, of course, she wasn’t very big to begin with.

Lonoff was at the hall closet, wrestling with his overshoes.

“Would you like me to come along? To help?” I asked.

“No, no. I can use the exercise after that egg.” He stamped his feet on the floor in an attempt to save himself from having to bend over again to get the boots on right. “And you must have things to write down. There’s paper on my desk.”

“Paper for what?”

“Your feverish notes.” He pulled a large, dark, belted coat—not
quite
a caftan—from the closet and I helped him into it. Pressing a dark hat over his bald head, he completed the picture I of the chief rabbi, the archdeacon, the magisterial high priest of I perpetual sorrows. I handed him his scarf, which had fallen out of a coat sleeve onto the floor. “You had an earful this morning.”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t so much.”

“So much as what, last night?”

“Last night?” Then does he know all I know? But what do I know, other than what I can imagine?

“I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction,” he said. “You’re a different person.”

“Am I?”

“I should hope so.” Then, as though having concluded ad ministering my rites of confirmation, he gravely shook my hand. “Which way did she go on the road? To the left?”

“Yes. Down the mountain.”

He found his gloves in his pocket and after a quick glance at his watch opened the front door. “It’s like being married to Tolstoy,” he said, and left me to make my feverish notes while he started off after the runaway spouse, some five minutes now into-her doomed journey in search of a less noble calling.

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