The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (10 page)

As he came to care more and more for Marianne, he found himself more and more knocking on the door of the hairdressers. Linda, a tall, plump, large-framed girl from the potato country in Maine, had, at the moment, pinkish hair. “It’s called Toulouse-Lautrec tint, if you’re not too dumb to know what that means,” she said to Russell. Linda was rough and coarse, but Russell was less put off by those vigorous qualities now that he had Marianne’s seriousness to lean on and at the same time to dampen his spirits. Linda would blow a week’s paycheck on whiskey, beer, crackers, and cheese for a party on Saturday night that might last until dawn. After that the girls would sleep until six Sunday night and then set about cleaning up the mess. Russell felt superior to Linda, and sometimes an expression of condescension appeared on his face. “You’d think you were God Almighty and I bet I make more washing greasy hair than you do at the junk shop!” Linda said to him over and over.

Marianne’s plebian sense of struggle embarrassed Russell. He didn’t want to hear about the coal mines, to feel their darkness falling upon him. When she started to remember strikes and lay-offs and grocery bills, a fatuous smile would come over Russell’s face and he would say abruptly, “You sure have one good pair of legs. The greatest.” He was as poor as Marianne had ever been and he had debts, but he was strangely spoiled.

One night he mentioned a particularly ferocious partly at the hairdressers’ rooms. Marianne frowned. The next time he went further. He said something in an offhand way about “last night” and she responded quickly, with irritation. “Last night! Honey, I thought you went home! It was after midnight when you left my place. And a weeknight at that. God!”

It was not long before his evening partings with Marianne were punctuated by pleas. “Russ, for God’s sake get some sleep! It’s nearly one o’clock.”

“So what?” he would say, not unkindly, teasing her. He felt a thrill of power. He did not want moral enlargement and he took pride of a kind in his ability to resist it.

Marianne usually came to the shop at three-thirty, after her classes were over. She polished, she mended, she rearranged, she swept. Mr. Soferis was pleased. Russell did not take credit for the change, such as it was, but he took credit for Marianne. Mr. Soferis said, “Russ, you got that girl just in time. My lawyer says to me last week, ‘What good does that Beacon Hill branch do you? You have the highest rent of all your outlets there and take in the least.’” Russell was interested in this information. He did not want to leave the Hill. Indeed he liked living in Boston. He had his little fund of jokes about old, grand Boston ladies and even made feeble attempts to imitate the popular local type. He sighed soulfully over Christmas Eve on Louisburg Square. “It’s great. Some of those old houses put on a real show.” He most certainly did not want to go back to the filling station.

Russell hinted at some of the shop’s troubles to Marianne. “I don’t think the stock is good enough and I’m going to tell the old man if I see him,” she said. Russell himself passed this diagnosis on to Soferis who mumbled, “I will send a few collector’s items in and see if they move.”

Marianne came in the shop as often as she could. She still brooded over her schoolwork. “Funny, I’m doing real well and all that,” she said. “There is only one person who’s better and he’s a real honest-to-goodness genius. Really something. Dickie Angelo. He’ll be big, we all think that. Probably do show clothes or something. His ideas are tremendous.”

For herself she was afraid of New York. “I can’t imagine myself there. Can you imagine me there, Russ? Now, honestly.”

For a moment Russell entertained the idea of Marianne as a big dress designer and himself as her manager. His reveries lacked stimulating detail because he knew so little about the dress business and, in addition, his pleasure was interrupted by Marianne’s speculation that she might have to go into a big factory, do more or less routine work, along with other young designers. And perhaps more classes at night in New York. “You don’t mind the work when you’re just nuts about something,” she explained. “But I’m just not that much sold on it now, for me.”

She had begun to learn a little about antiques. She had a book on old glass from the public library. Russell offered his advice. “You don’t need to know all that, doll. At least not for a dump like this. I bet there’s not a seller working for Soferis who bothers to know the stuff in books. All you need is a few words and phrases and well...” he reflected carefully, “well, a pleasant manner.”

“I don’t want to seem stupid if somebody asks me something,” Marianne said.

Russell was patient and shrewd. He had learned a few things at the Olympia. “The customers who really know the stuff don’t expect the sellers to tell them what’s what. I think, personally, they like it better if you don’t know what’s going on with the items. They are more likely to make a discovery, get something for nothing. All you have to do is just say, ‘Wedgwood’ or something like that. If it isn’t right, they smile.”

When Marianne was in the shop, puttering about, smiling, talking nicely to the customers, Russell felt a satisfaction he had hardly ever known before. And yet something about Marianne’s diligence vexed him too. He sensed with great alarm that she was settling down with him at the Olympia. There would soon be little left of her career except the lump of guilt about The Fair Store and her patrons back home. Russell thought with horror of the cheap shops in the neighborhood, of the aging, gray, husband and wife presiding grayly over their worthless trinkets, their chipped cups and paperweights, their splattered hunting prints, their cake trays and finger bowls of blue glass. They were always cooking something on a burner at the back of the store. The jingling of the bell of the front door always found them slyly chewing. The smell of stale coffee, cigarette smoke, and dust, endless dust and quiet. The dreadful quiet, that was what Russell meant by hard work. Life was well-dressed call girls sweeping into a bar at dusk, businessmen with white convertibles waiting outside, soft strings and the sway of harp music. If his fear of the junk shop came to him late at night, when he was at home, he would call Linda and take her to his room. “I don’t think you’re in love with that hillbilly you’ve been going around with,” she said to him brazenly one night. “You sure don’t act like a man in love.”

No, he certainly didn’t love Marianne, he would tell himself, with a sore heart. In fact he hated her. Her desolating memories provoked his anger. He, with his bad teeth, his debts, his round, tired face, his dingy cot, his listlessness, had, however, never known despair. His usual feeling was one of complacency. When Marianne said to him, as she often did, “You know, the coal business is shot to hell, Russ,” he felt as if she were uttering a witch’s curse.

During one of these discussions he replied furiously, breathing hard, “Look, I don’t give a damn about the coal business!”

“But I
do
, honey,” she said emphatically. “That’s where all my people are.”

She was a demon, of that he had no doubt. It was a solace to go back to his Pinckney Street rooming house and talk to the drunken short-order cook, who was planning a trip to Puerto Rico. The cook had been there once before. He spoke confidently of getting a job in an expensive tourist hotel and somehow sharing in the golden holiday life. The cook was ragged, ugly, stupid, and lazy, but it did seem to Russell that this bereft, sad creature would someday return to Puerto Rico and present himself clean, sober, useful to the assembled gaiety.

Russell’s broodings were broken by impulsive actions. He borrowed a hundred and fifty dollars from a bank to buy a 1947 Chrysler convertible. The act exhilarated him. “It’s like being barefoot when you’re without a car,” he said to Marianne, expansively.

Six months passed quickly. Marianne clung to him. It puzzled him that a girl so capable should be so clinging. He was relieved when she went home to help out while her mother was ill. She was only gone for a week and yet he was disconsolate without her. Now that he might have seen Linda whenever he pleased, he preferred to wander about alone. And then Marianne returned, for the end of school. She was penniless, alone in Boston, looking to him. He raged inwardly. In the evenings they rode about, silently, in his hot, sticky car, under a thick, threatening sky.

She said to him one night, “You know, Russ, I bet old Soferis would sell out to us. If not right now, maybe in a couple of years.”

Russell shouted at her, “I hate you!”

“Okay, honey, okay,” Marianne said quickly. Her hand touched his sleeve. After a time she whispered to him, lovingly, willingly, “ I agree with you. Trying to palm off a lot of dirty junk on people isn’t anything to get excited about...It’s hard to know what to do with your life.”

Russell was dismayed. Marianne was smothering him. Her concession meant little and he was actually sickened by the world of cause and effect, work and reward, as she saw it. All that was real and inevitable to her was deeply, sickeningly unreal to him. He didn’t believe in it. What was at the end of the line after working and saving? Nothing, nothing — just more working and saving. It was a fraud. You couldn’t work hard enough and you couldn’t save anything. Marianne and her work-ruined relatives were stumbling old ghosts, warped and futile as the gaping, black entrances to worn out, abandoned coal mines. He hated them and meant to escape.

And in the end something came to reward Russell’s faith. One of those chancy out-of-the-blue “propositions” came his way, just in time, and just as he had always known it would.

A few mornings later a man came into the shop, a man he knew from the Irish bar as “Ken.”

“I’ve got a few dogs I’m taking South,” Ken said.

“Dogs?”

“Racing dogs. They’ve been at Wonderland. Cleaning up. Now, we’re pushing on.”

“You mean the dogs are yours, Ken?” Russell asked politely, eager not to seem to care what the answer might be.

“Well, say I’ve got an interest in them. Put it that way.”

Russell smiled. It came out that Ken wanted him for exactly what he had to offer, for his unskilled, tolerant presence, his companionship, his indolent availability.

“If you’re not tied down,” Ken expanded, “I thought you might just welcome a change. Just going along with me, doing what comes up. Sort of assisting me. You won’t get rich and you won’t starve. Might have a ball while you’re about it, too.”

Russ was ready. “Wind up in a couple days and we’ll be off,” Ken said, slapping him lightly on the shoulder to seal the bargain.

Mr. Soferis was informed at noontime of the loss of his manager. Russell said, with a businesslike air, “The girl who’s been helping me out, as a friend, could most likely take over for a while until you get reorganized.”

“Is the kid honest?”

“Honest! Are you kidding? An honor graduate.”

“Okay. Give her your key and I’ll see her in the shop that morning after you’re gone. I expect she’s been running the joint anyway, the way women do.”

It was not so easy to figure out how he could make the arrangements with Marianne without meeting her face-to-face, and that he could not bear to do. The idea of writing a note was alien to him, also. At last he did what he could. He asked Linda, in her capacity as his neighbor, to call and to say that he had to go away temporarily on business with Uncle Walt and that Soferis wanted her to hold down his job at the shop until Russell got back. For the key — it would be left with the bartender at the Vesuvius.

c. 1954–1960

“I can’t imagine why I rush around so, taking in things. No doubt this frenzy of mine can be laid at the door of the critics, since I follow their lead like a witless lamb. When I think I may miss ‘the greatest
Aïda
of the century,’ it makes me absolutely frantic, even though I am always saying I am not particularly fond of opera as a form. Perhaps I just love
going
to the opera.” Thus Mrs. Lily Wayland, with her cool and yet incorrigibly flirtatious smile, addressed her cocktail guests. The occasion was a small party for her daughter, Adele, who would soon be sailing to Europe for a year of study. Adele looked like a debutante, and everyone, even her mother, thought it engaging and a little absurd that she had just recently earned her doctorate at New York University.

“Your great love of singing seems to come upon you just when Mrs. Ives sends you her every-other-Monday box tickets.” Thus Adele Wayland, as if for the instruction of her friends, corrected her mother while fastidiously maintaining a cozy and bantering tone. Mother and daughter trimmed their dialogue with irony and contradiction, and liked to be “amiably cross” with each other. There was no hostility in this; it was, on the contrary, affection, admiration, and common interests well understood and accepted that allowed them the pleasure of their corrections and reversals.

“I admit I can’t abide to miss ‘the greatest
Aïda
of the century’ when Mrs. Ives sends me an expensive ticket. I wouldn’t dream of forgoing the Kabuki Dancers when I am taken there, all paid for, in the Boardmans’ limousine.” And then Mrs. Wayland widened her eyes and said, “Isn’t it wicked to be so trivial, so poor, and yet so luxury-mad — so fond of the best seat, so proud of someone else’s plushy car? A chauffeur is to me an overwhelming creature. I somehow cannot think ill of anyone with the money to hire such a person. I could love an ape if he were driven about by a man in a cap and leggings.”

Mrs. Wayland and her daughter were handsome, intelligent, and spoken of as “a little different.” About this phrase, Mrs. Wayland would shudder and say, “That makes me feel like a fabric that’s been on the markdown counter too long.” Both mother and daughter could be identified in an interesting whisper when they entered the room. Mrs. Wayland had been an actress, the informing voice would say. Adele Wayland was “awfully bright,” a student of the fine arts. Mrs. Wayland had married for love and given up her career; her husband had been gay and handsome; with Lily’s help, he ran through the money he had inherited from his father, and he died in an airplane crash while he was acting as his own pilot. “I was of the breed of Cornelia Otis Skinner and Ruth Draper,” Mrs. Wayland would say in her throaty voice, “although I didn’t do monologues. I was well bred, well trained, intelligent, began my interest in the theater at Smith College — that kind of thing. Such bulky
equipment
is not what I personally care for in the theater. For greatness, a little dirt, a hint of the gutter, the grand slut — that’s the real thing. Hunger, violence, vice, outrageousness. My vices are of the bourgeois order. I love comfort, rich sauces, lots of money, and utter adoration!”