The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (31 page)

Zona’s sister. That’s who we’re talking about, right? The sister is the mother of Carlos. It’s horrible to think of Zona gone like that. From the back seat.

Tony said, What back seat? But Joseph declined. Nothing, Tony, nothing. Just shot.

Tony said: History of this goddam city — at least a footnote to the history of these fucking times. The whole place is a firing range, up and down and across.

Joseph said: Zona’s not a footnote to me. I loved Zona.

Didn’t we all? came back over the wire.

The next morning, Carlos arrived at a town house on East Ninety-first Street, the house of Cynthia, the flute player. The door was ajar and noise could be heard inside — voices, a phonograph, a telephone ringing and answered. Carlos pushed the bell button and waited next to a stone urn of faltering geraniums. After a time, a young girl, about his age, called out for Granny, and after a minute or two here came Cynthia in a smock. This time the opening line was: I’m Carlos. From Zona.

How nice. Come in, come in. You are welcome here.

There were boots and umbrellas in the hallway, coats hanging on pegs, newspapers stacked for recycling — quite a busy entrance, you’d have to say.

Carlos was led into the front parlor, where there was a piano, along with bookcases, two-seater sofas, and a big, lumpy armchair by the window, to which he was directed. Cynthia drew a chair very near to him, and her greenish, amiable eyes gazed into his liquid black ones and at last she said: I missed Zona this week. You know — Carlos, is it? — that I consider it very brave of Zona to set foot into my jungle. An army couldn’t handle it. You can see that, I’m sure. But Zona found things to do, and I am much in her debt.

Carlos looked aside. Zona passed away, he said.

Cynthia sat up straight as a rod in her chair and looked up at the ceiling for a long time. At last she said: I wasn’t prepared for this. Passed on from this life, Zona. Just like that.

Zona passed away, he repeated, and Cynthia seemed lost in contemplation, meditation of some kind. Oh, oh, passed away. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I hope it was an easy death. An easy passage after a hard, honorable life.

Carlos said: No, ma’am. It wasn’t easy. Zona was shot.

Cynthia drew her chair nearer, brought her golden-gray head so close that Carlos tilted his black curls back a bit. Then Cynthia placed her long fingers on his hand and drew his other brown hand over her own so that they were in a clasp like that practiced in progressive churches. Shot, you say. More than the heart can bear.

Cynthia grew up in Baltimore, went to the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, had a three-week summer session in Paris with Rampal, and in her younger years had played for a time in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Then she came with her husband and daughter to New York and bought the house on Ninety-first Street. Thirty-nine thousand it cost then, she would say. Only that. The money had come from the closing of her grandfather’s Baltimore business, a handsome store where well-to-do women could buy dresses, coats and satin lingerie, cologne and face powder. Three floors in a fine downtown brick building, clerks long in service, and seamstresses with pins in their mouths while making alterations. Ours was a
select
business, she would say with an ironical lilt and the special tone of Unitarian modesty. It was very well known and much respected in the community. To be that, you had to be somewhat cool to ordinary people. You didn’t want them to look at things and then go pale at the price. But the doors were welcoming to one and all on the Day After the Fourth of July Sale. A yearly excitement it was, people in line at seven in the morning.

Releasing the hand of Carlos, Cynthia said: Tell me what you and your family have been going through. She passed him a damp cookie and a cat entered the room and settled on his lap. Carlos ate the cookie and stroked the cat. Looking hard at Cynthia, he said in a tone of apology: You see, I never met any of the people Zona worked for before this happened. I don’t know just what they might want to hear.

I want to hear what you can bear to tell, Cynthia said.

In a breathless rush, Carlos told about the livery car that had taken Zona back and forth to her work, about the passenger who got in from the radio call and hadn’t been caught yet. And he added that his mother, Zona’s sister, would have come round to the people but she was home crying herself crazy.

I will attend Zona’s funeral, Cynthia said. I want to be there. For me, it would be an honor. And it occurs to me that if you wish I might play a little music. Something suitable, of course.

Carlos raised his hand to interrupt. It was time to complete his errand: We haven’t been able to make the arrangements for Zona.

Cynthia said at this point: Funeral arrangements cost much more than they need to. I read a book about that — although I didn’t need to be informed about the ways of such institutions.

Carlos, a diver at the tip of the board, fixed his glance on Cynthia’s bright head of white hair, with the brown streaks turning golden. He said: She’s been there a week while we couldn’t make the arrangements. They put them in the ground, like in a field, they say.

Been where?

With the city down where they keep them. If you can’t make the arrangements to transfer, they put them —

Oh, Cynthia said. You mean Potter’s Field?

Carlos said: That sounds like it.

The granddaughter who had opened the door came into the room and introductions were made. As she was going out, she said to Carlos: You’re cute.

This young person is in a state of bereavement, Cynthia called to the girl. And she added: Neither of my grandchildren is musical. They can’t sing “Adeste Fideles” in tune. A deprivation.

Pigeons rested on the sills of the long, handsome, smeary windows still divided into the original panes and now interrupted only by a rusty air-conditioner. I can’t take it all in, Cynthia said. I would like to know what Zona’s family needs.

What we want, ma’am, he said, what we want is a coffin on a train, and a few of us family will go down and have her buried in Opelika.

Opelika? Where is that?

Alabama. Zona’s town.

Opelika, Alabama. What a pretty name.

The ground down there’s paid for, Carlos explained.

Cynthia drew a pencil from the pocket of her smock, found a pad, and began to write on it. I have probably waited too long to sell this house, she said. The prices are falling fast — the darkness deepening, as the hymn goes.

Cynthia and her chamber-music group occasionally held concerts in this house, and at one of those Joseph had brought Tony along. Tony, when the invitation came, said: I might have guessed you’d go for that, Joseph. German.

During the wine and cheese, inferior quality indeed, Tony approached Cynthia and in an excited mode informed her: You are sitting on a million bucks here — if not exactly in mint condition. He noted the paneling, the high ceilings, and the matching fireplaces of decorated marble on the first floor. Assets you have here. A million for sure, at the bottom.

Tony was floating like a sturdy little boat on the waters of the house market. A million for the property and another mil
at least
to do it up. They’re terrorists, these buyers. They like to gut the place, break down walls, even move the staircase so they can put a powder room under it. Space, dear lady, that’s the ticket. Space is what you have to sell.

Of course, Cynthia stayed on. The house, the space, was all she had to leave her daughter, the way things looked. She rented rooms to students, gave lessons, while lamenting that the lesson-takers were mostly girls and few strong enough for the instrument. In these rooms now she was contemplating life and death with Carlos. It was calculated that a thousand dollars was needed to rescue Zona. And there was the problem with cashing checks, and just two days before they would, down there at the city, before they would —

Please, please, Carlos. Don’t speak of it. More than the heart can bear.

Cynthia’s finances were more than a little murky. Her husband, when they moved to New York, had worked for a publishing group that put out
Family Days
. Perhaps he got a bit overloaded on that, and he squared the circle, so to speak, and shifted to
Liberty
, when that magazine was around. He also shifted to an ignorant girl in the mail room. Cynthia was left to provide for her daughter, who quit Barnard College in her freshman year, took up with a boy from Columbia, and went up to New Hampshire with him to pursue carpentry and to produce two daughters. Cynthia had bits of trust funds from the old Baltimore emporium, from a childless uncle, and from her father, who declined the clothing business and went into a small local bank, not very successfully. He raised his nice, musical daughter, who ended up on the flute.

At last, toward noon, with the temperamental city sun shining one minute and disappearing the next, as if turning a corner, Cynthia found a sweater and put her arm through the arm of Carlos, and the odd tandem made its way down Lexington Avenue to the Chemical Bank. Inside the bank, the odd tandem became an alarming couple; Carlos like a thief avoiding eye contact with the teller, a young Indian woman in a sari, and Cynthia, in an old gentlewoman’s untidy fluster, withdrawing a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties.

They stood outside in humbling confusion until the money in two envelopes was passed into the hands of Carlos. Off in a gallop to the subway and to do the paperwork down there where they were impatiently holding the body of Zona. Alert the River Jordan Twenty-Four-Hour Funeral Service. And at last meet the train rolling down to Washington, D.C.; there a crunching change of cars, a wait, before wheeling through state after state, through West Virginia, passing the memory of the prehistoric Mound Builders and the rusting scaffolds of the anthracite-coal counties. On to the point of the Chattanooga Campaign, down to the grass and myrtle of the cemetery lying in the Alabama autumn. Journey’s end.

Adios, Carlos. Au revoir, Zona. Rest in peace in Opelika.

Cynthia recounted the dire circumstances to Joseph, who said, I loved Zona. A great hole in my life, this is. It’s like planting a field of seeds and none of them coming up. In a manner of speaking.

Cynthia said: Nothing for Planned Parenthood this year. But no matter, no matter.

Tony, informed, said: They love funerals.

1993

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1946, 1948, 1949, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1993, 2010 by the Estate of Elizabeth Hardwick

Introduction copyright © 2010 by Darryl Pinckney

All rights reserved.

“The Temptations of Dr. Hoffmann,” “Evenings at Home,” and “Yes and No” originally appeared in
Partisan Review.
“A Season’s Romance,” “The Oak and the Axe,” “The Classless Society,” “The Purchase,” “The Bookseller,” and “Shot: A New York Story” originally appeared in
The New Yorker
. “Cross-town” originally appeared in
Antaeus
. “Back Issues” and “On the Eve” originally appeared in
The New York Review of Books.

Cover image: Jane Freilicher,
Early New York Evening
, 1954; collection of Elizabeth Hazan; courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged another edition of this book as follows:

Hardwick, Elizabeth.

[Short stories. Selections]

The New York stories of Elizabeth Hardwick / by Elizabeth Hardwick ; [selected and] introduction by Darryl Pinckney.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-287-2 (alk. paper)

1. New York (N.Y.) — Fiction. I. Pinckney, Darryl, 1953– II. Title.

PS3515.A5672N49 2010

813'.52 — dc22

2009041526

eISBN 978-1-59017-441-8
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014