The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (5 page)

“I don’t think she’s pretty,” Elsa said. “Just because she happens to be my father’s mother am I to think her pretty if she isn’t?”

Elsa had a quiet, small, and melodious voice, but it could be decisive and full of inordinate rage at times. The girl’s personality was split wide open with contraries and I never knew precisely what I thought of her; if I accepted as final the rather rigid self-consciousness she usually showed around adults, she would betray my impression by the alarming conviction with which she could, when provoked, take her part in the world.

“Elsa!” Mrs. Hoffmann said, winking at me. I think, however, she meant this weak exclamation as a rebuke to her daughter.

Dr. Hoffmann began to cough, but this did not successfully conceal the agitation he felt. His brow was drawn into a severe frown and it was painful to see him thus insulted and hurt by his daughter. All his attention was for Elsa and I believed he had forgotten his wife or, perhaps, she had lost her capacity to touch him deeply and so she was really outside the situation. Dr. Hoffmann stood up and I saw that he was going to leave the house and guessed, from the automatic way in which he did this, that he usually resolved domestic troubles by disappearing for a short time. He rushed into the hall and got his coat. When he was ready to leave he stopped by my chair and said, “I’m sure you will excuse me. I want to go out for a walk.”

After we heard the door shut Mrs. Hoffmann said to Elsa, “Why in the world did you say such a thing? I don’t understand you.” The mother was so calm, her optimism so steadfast, that I thought she showed a lack of feeling. In any case, I was sure she didn’t comprehend the delicate and precarious way her husband was put together or to what extremities of emotion her daughter was being driven.

“I only spoke the truth,” Elsa said. “I’ve heard how badly his mother treated you.” She was straining to say more and was obviously baffled by her mother’s reprimand when she had so clearly summoned up all her courage to act on the side of righteousness: her mother’s side always. “You told me that when I was born his mother faked a heart attack and that he was at her bedside instead of yours.” The girl made me uncomfortable and I watched with embarrassment her raw, even ruthless, intensity, which in its lack of subterfuge impugned her decorous parents. “That was wrong, wasn’t it?” she insisted, giving a heavy stress to the word
wrong
.

“Tsk! Tsk!” Mrs. Hoffmann said gaily. “I’m always astonished by you. How in the world did you remember that story? Really, it’s amazing! I’d forgotten all about it myself.” I hadn’t thought it possible the situation could be turned into a joke, but that was what was happening. Mrs. Hoffmann was smiling and shaking her finger at her daughter as if she were teasing her about a childish love affair.

“You told me yourself!” Elsa repeated. She was nervously working her fingers in and out as if they were cramped and I sympathized with her frustration even though her temperament appalled me. Evidently she could no longer bear to have her feelings exposed and she got up, like some defeated but still recalcitrant crusader, and said she was going to her room to read the Bible.

I was taken aback by this in spite of the fact that I had known Elsa went to church and that she had had a solid Protestant education. When we were alone, Mrs. Hoffmann whispered to me, “She’s very religious, and in quite a funny way. Not like her father.” I was hoping she would clarify this by telling me something about Dr. Hoffmann but I was disappointed. She said merely that Elsa was straitlaced and more interested in her fear of God than in the teachings of Christ, and then she gave up altogether her attempt to discriminate.

I knew what she meant, or at least I thought I detected in Elsa some of the feelings I had once experienced. While we were talking Dr. Hoffmann returned and I was relieved to find he had managed during his walk to regain his composure. He was a little out of breath and, though he still seemed dejected, his eyes snapped vigorously and he was enough interested in conversation to make me repeat what I had said about his daughter’s religious turn. I told him I thought Elsa was going through a dreary period of Protestant asceticism and that she was searching for prohibitions and would have welcomed discipline of a more rigorous kind than his system demanded. He neither agreed nor disagreed with me. (My only justification for my analysis was my remembrance of the elation I had once felt in giving up dancing and picture shows for a year. The joy in my own purity was intensified by the actions of my older sisters who in that same year fell very far from grace and spent most of their energy getting and keeping boyfriends so that they were much too exhausted to read the Bible before retiring. My prayers were all for them, because I knew I was
saved
.) Of course, I hastened to add that I was only twelve at the time of this spiritual exaltation and that the whole thing had suddenly vanished, never to return. Dr. Hoffmann was always attentive to anecdotes about the Bible Belt, but he knew so little about that part of America that his interest was more anthropological than anything else and sometimes, in his presence, I felt as if I’d been brought up in the Fiji Islands. Once I heard him repeat a story I had told him about a prostitute who, during a temporary conversion, had said that her downfall was due to a compulsion to answer every knock on her door because she thought the caller might be Jesus. He evidently enjoyed his picture of this woman very much, but I don’t think he understood that she was entirely serious — or so she had seemed to me when I heard her harangue on the streets of my hometown. I actually felt, I suppose, that she made as much sense on religion as Dr. Hoffmann and I was bewildered that he should find her comical.

The conversation returned to his daughter, but he did not mention the outburst that had occurred. His refusal to go over the incident made me think he had not worked out a satisfactory point of view toward it. The only thing important about his relation to Elsa was that she didn’t like him and he could hardly have been expected to recognize that; instead he was under the delusion that everything the child said was dictated by reason.

Things took a turn for the worse when Mrs. Hoffmann’s sufferings became so acute she had to go to Arizona. Elsa was plainly hysterical about her mother’s departure, but after she acknowledged the inevitability of the separation she settled down into a morbid resignation that rather chilled me. Poor Mrs. Hoffmann was terrified by her new adventure. She hadn’t traveled much in America and her feeling of loneliness was already upon her, even as she planned the trip. She said, trying to laugh, “They’ll think I’m a spy out there.”

The actual parting was very touching. At the last moment Dr. Hoffmann slyly suggested that his wife might do well to take along some reprints of his articles. I saw the titles of those he chose for her and they were such things as “Democracy and Christianity” and “American Interpretations of Christ.” Mrs. Hoffmann took them as if they were a kind of passport, which perhaps they were.

Without the mother the house was somewhat changed, but I continued to go there frequently, perhaps more often than I should have because it made me neglect my work. Whenever I came home early, intending to stay in my room, I no sooner got settled than one of the ladies came in to talk to me. My most frequent visitor was a woman who wanted to tell me over and over about the fine position she had once had in the City Hall at Akron and the dramatic way in which she had been cheated out of it. When she started to talk I always excused myself from listening by saying that I had an appointment with the Hoffmanns. There was no real connection between the meaning of Dr. Hoffmann and my living among these pathetic, broken ladies, but I found that I always saw the two conditions as necessary to each other and I looked upon the apartment downstairs as a kind of repudiation of the life I was living. I fooled myself into believing Dr. Hoffmann was happier than my isolated acquaintances, which was ridiculous because he was only more interesting and intelligent. My reason told me that the comfort of his apartment, the presence there of more than one person, didn’t make any of his problems less painful. Symbolically he, too, had lost a fine position in Akron through a thousand relentless treacheries, and yet the exterior circumstances of his existence so well conformed to my idea of all life was supposed to hold for an adult that I persisted in thinking his household benefited by the fact that each stood in a set position to the other — wife, husband, father, daughter, etc. — and that they were, thereby, excluded from the kind of loneliness I saw about me and often felt myself. Dr. Hoffmann evidently had something of the same notion because he was always saying to me, as if to reassure me that I was welcome, “Ah, don’t stay up there by yourself.” He would make a round gesture with his arm to indicate that in his house there was a meaningful contrast to those rooms upstairs which were meant for single occupants.

As the time passed Elsa became more and more ascetic and more and more dictatorial with her friends. Often I heard her on the telephone defending her belief that lipstick was the work of the devil. She applied herself diligently to her studies, but nothing seemed to relieve her unhappiness and discontent. The sad thing was that there was no way for the tension between Elsa and her father to dissipate itself, but an argument did occur one night that seemed to me significant, not so much in what it decided as in the fact that Dr. Hoffmann appeared to me to become aware then of the complexity of his nature and to see how it had ruled his family life.

It was a bad night and a wet, unpleasant snow was falling outside. The wind was blowing furiously up Riverside Drive and New York was depressing. I had not been in the Hoffmann apartment for almost a week and I was more than a little anxious to learn how things were going there. Both the father and daughter seemed in low spirits when I entered and I could guess that Elsa was being more silent than usual and that her father was again desperate about her. He kept looking at her as if he were pleading for some unspecified favor.

“How is Mrs. Hoffmann?” I asked, thinking of her good luck in being away from the wind and the cold.

“Oh, she gets along as well as could be expected,” the doctor answered solemnly. “She writes that it is very cold in Germany and that she didn’t get the last package I sent her. She has always been delicate and I don’t see how she can survive the winter. Poor soul! It’s so hard on the very old and the very young.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead and sighed.

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother, but I was really asking after your wife,” I said. Immediately I recognized my error.

Dr. Hoffmann, with that fatal foolishness that was also his strength and nobility, had spoken in good faith and was unprepared for the ferocity with which his daughter turned upon him. Elsa grunted with pleasure at my remark and it must have offered her the final proof on this tormenting subject. I couldn’t really dislike her for what followed. She wasn’t mean or petty; she was caught in the fury of her own emotions and in her wretchedness must have believed she was defending her mother, though in actuality I felt her purpose was to commit an act of aggression against her father, to punish him for his innocence. “Perhaps the first Mrs. Hoffmann is more important in this house!” she said, forcing herself with all the grim self-righteousness in her nature to look at her father as she spoke. “You are always talking about her. You don’t seem to worry about how we’ll save the money to keep Mother in Arizona. You have never worried about her. Not even when I was born!” Her nice, adolescent voice had become very shrill and she was starting to cry.

“What are you talking about? When you were born?” her father asked, utterly bewildered by her tone and accusation. He had turned quite pale, but, as always, was very patient with his daughter.

“I know that you were at your own mother’s bedside when I was born. She has always come first. You don’t love us half as much!” Elsa had become very childish and was sobbing wildly. Her father did not seem to recognize her childishness any more than he noticed the unnatural maturity she sometimes showed. To him she was an equal. He loved her and she was crying!

Just as he was preparing to speak to her and to reassure her, a strange thing happened to him. He looked away from Elsa, or rather she seemed to vanish from his sight, and that frown of anguish I had often seen on his face returned. I thought that a deep shiver passed through his body, the physical evidence of a sudden revelation that had enormous implications for him.

“Why didn’t she come here with us?” Elsa went on desperately. “She’s nothing but a Nazi anyway. She would rather die than leave Germany. It’s a wonder you didn’t stay with her, since you’ve never been happy away from her.”

With great effort her father drew his attention back to her. “What are you saying? What are you saying?” he kept repeating. For a moment he seemed to entertain the hope that she might deny what she had said, but this had to be abandoned. I imagined he knew already that he could never forget Elsa’s words no matter what happened; he was now too deep in his own recognition.

Elsa’s venom spent itself quickly, as if she had, in that same second when her father was staggering under a monstrously increased burden of emotion, gone hollow and empty with the exhaustion of release. She had just barely enough breath for her whimpering and sobbing and to say, “I’m sorry.” Then she went quietly and quickly into her room and closed the door behind her.

I was anxious to get away and was relieved that Dr. Hoffmann had ignored me. He was a man of such passion that his feelings could shut him off from the world and he sat there wrinkling his mouth, shaking his head, fighting his tears as if he were alone. I got up and tiptoed to the door, but he stopped me. “Do you suppose it’s true?” he asked. I offered no answer, but I could tell from the despair in his voice that he had answered his own question.

“Good night, Dr. Hoffmann,” I said, as casually as I was able.

He seemed not to hear me and as I closed the door he was whispering to himself, “Mother, release me! Release me!”