The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (6 page)

Back in my room I felt guilty about Dr. Hoffmann and hoped to put him out of my mind, but I found that in spite of my good intentions I was trying to put his life together and to find some answer to the question of his religious faith. A rather neat case was available to me. This despondent man was struggling to the depths of his being with a real situation, one that had marked and maimed him long before he was old enough to know God, theology, or philosophy. There was no doubt that Dr. Hoffmann’s life had been dominated by his mother and, since his father was hardly ever mentioned, it seemed reasonable to assume he hadn’t had a father in the most necessary and vital emotional sense. And, I went on, this abiding vacancy in his feeling and experience had led him, at a time when most of his contemporaries accepted the opposite view, to seek his fulfillment in a Heavenly Father.

Before going to bed I looked out of the window. It had stopped snowing and the Drive was almost deserted except for the buses that went by from time to time. As I stood there I saw Dr. Hoffmann walking below. I recognized his posture and when he stopped to cross under the streetlight I got a glimpse of his face, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough to know what mood he might be in. Acknowledging again Dr. Hoffmann’s physical existence — there he was below me, walking alone, breathing, thinking, perhaps suffering — I became dissatisfied with the way in which I had tried to organize his personality. What good did it do me to know that he was, as they say, searching for a father? I lacked specific details of his experience and even if I had known him forever I could never have felt certain of my abstraction.

Not long afterward I met the young man from Kentucky on the street and he was very cool to me. That was no surprise because our contempt for each other had never been violated except on that afternoon at the Hoffmanns, and that was, in his case, like a brief but violent drunkenness which he could not account for. Again we were forced to recognize the great differences in our temperament, divergencies which had manifest themselves long, long ago. He knew me, I’m sorry to say, for what I had been in college: the village atheist and Stalin fan. (He did not know I had repented about Stalin if not about God.) I had always found him unbearably tedious, but, to be truthful, I suppose I might have endured his dullness if it had not been for his piety. Now it was a relief to get back to this natural distaste for each other and I somehow felt he was more real today than he had been at the Hoffmanns. We had hardly exchanged a word before I noted that he had also repudiated Dr. Hoffmann and that his flirtation with liberalism had suffered a rude disenchantment. Strangely enough I soon began to see that the primary disappointment with Dr. Hoffmann centered around the fact that the doctor and I got along so well. I at first found this difficult to accept, but then my friend had always taken important steps under the influence of the most irrelevant prejudices. He wasn’t interested in me because I had nothing to do with his life, but I think he unconsciously demanded that Dr. Hoffmann and I should have been divided by my lack of belief in the principles which governed Dr. Hoffmann’s understanding of the world. The fact that we had remained friendly seemed to tell him more about Dr. Hoffmann than about me — and perhaps he was right.

He said to me, “What do you talk to Dr. Hoffmann about? Religion?”

“Religion?” I said. “We have never discussed that seriously.” I could not explain this, but it was true. “We talk mostly about politics and people.”

“Are you still in doubt about Dr. Hoffmann’s belief in God?”

“Certainly,” I said, “but that’s merely a private opinion.”

My friend gave me a weak smile and departed. I felt quite angry with him, but I suppose the real truth was that we were both angry with Dr. Hoffmann. My friend and I knew where we stood with each other, but neither of us had a clear idea of Dr. Hoffmann. I was suddenly weary of researches into the problem of the doctor’s religious faith, even though I didn’t feel I had been entirely unsuccessful. There was that sad business about his mother and nothing he could say or do would alter the fact that his past and present were overcast by her ominous and insatiable shadow. Illogically perhaps, my knowledge of Dr. Hoffmann’s participation in this prevalent maladjustment of his times brought him down to earth and gave me the courage to state once more my conviction that he couldn’t approach God or think of Christ as His Son any more than I could.... Or could he?

I suppose the truth cannot be known. These things are inexplicable, but in naming them so I did not for a moment definitely affirm his faith. That my mind stubbornly refused to do — all my observations pointed to the contrary.

1946

I am here in Kentucky with my family for the first time in a number of years and, naturally, I am quite uncomfortable, but not in the way I had anticipated before leaving New York. The thing that startles me is that I am completely free and can do and say exactly what I wish. This freedom leads me to the bewildering conclusion that the notions I have entertained about my family are fantastic manias, complicated, willful distortions which are so clearly contrary to the facts that I might have taken them from some bloody romance, or, to be more specific, from one of those childhood stories in which the heroine, ragged and cast off, roams the cold streets begging alms which go into the eager hands of a tyrannical stepmother.

I staggered a bit when I actually came face-to-face with my own mother: she carries no whips, gives no evidence of cannibalism. At night everyone sleeps peacefully. So far as I can judge they accuse me of no crimes, make no demands upon me; they neither praise nor criticize me excessively. My uneasiness and defensiveness are quite beside the point, like those flamboyant but unnecessary gestures of our old elocution teacher. My family situation is distinguished by only one eccentricity — it is entirely healthy and normal. This truth is utterly disarming; nothing I have felt in years has disturbed me so profoundly as this terrible fact. I had grown accustomed to a flat and literal horror, the usual childhood traumas, and having been away from home for a long time I had come to believe these fancies corresponded to life, that one walked in the door, met his parents, his brothers and sisters, and there they were, the family demons, bristling, frowning, and leaping at one’s throat. I was well prepared to enjoy the battle and felt a certain superiority because I was the only one among us who had read up on the simplicities and inevitabilities of family life, the cripplings and jealousies, the shock of birth and brutality of parenthood. When I did not find these hostilities it was just as if the laws of the universe had stopped and I became wary and confused. It is awful to be faced each day with love that is neither too great nor too small, generosity that does not demand payment in blood; there are no rules for responding, no schemes that explain what this is about, and so each smile is a challenge, each friendly gesture an intellectual crisis.

I cannot sit down to a meal without staring off in a distraction and when they ask me what I am thinking I am ashamed to say that I am recalling my
analysis
of all of them, pacing again, in some amazement, the ugly, angry, damp alleys I think of as my inheritance. But now that I look around the table and can see these family faces — my father’s narrow skull, the sudden valley that runs down my mother’s cheeks from the ears to the chin, my sister’s smile which uncovers her large, crooked teeth and makes one think for the moment that she is as huge as an old workhorse, though she is, except for her great teeth, very frail — everything I see convinces me that I have been living with a thousand delusions. The simple, benign reality is something else. (I have only one just complaint and that is that the radio is never turned off.) But where are the ancient misdeeds and brutish insufficiences that have haunted me for years?

My nephew, a brown-haired boy of three, disconcerts me as much as anything else. When I take him on my lap I feel he is mocking me for the countless times I have lamented that he should be doomed to grow up
here
. Since the day of his birth I have been shuddering and sighing in his behalf; I have sung many requiems for him and placed sweet wreaths on his grave; but often he looks at me, perhaps noticing the lines on my face and the glaze on my eyes, as if he were returning my solicitude.

At least one thing I anticipated is true and it makes me happy to acknowledge that I am bored. The evenings are just as long as ever, dead, dead, “nothing going on.” I take a deep breath and yearn for the morning so that I can go downtown to see how the old place is coming along. And when I get on the streets I see vigorous, cheerful faces which, in spite of the dark corners and violent frustrations in small-town life, beam with self-love and sparkle with pride. These magnificent countenances seem to be announcing: Look! I made it! And the wives — completely stunned by the marvelous possession of these blithe, busy husbands. They sigh tenderly under the delightful burdens of propitious marriages and smile at the less fortunate with queenly compassion. Some wan, sensitive souls carry the dreadful obligations of being “wellborn” and do their noble penance by assuming an expert, affecting dowdiness, like so many rusty, brown, pedigreed dogs who do not dare to bark.

There is something false and perverse in my playing the observer, I who have lived here as long as anyone. Still these bright streets do not belong to me and I feel, not like someone who chose to move away, but as if I had been, as the expression goes, “run out of town.” I can remember only one person to whom that disgrace actually happened and he was a dapper, fastidious little man who spoke in what we used to call a “cultured” voice and spent the long, beautiful afternoons in the park beside the wading pond in which the children under five played. No doubt he too went to New York, the exile for those with evil thoughts.

For the first week or so everything went well here and I was, during this sweet coma, under the impression that I might have a fine time. And suddenly a terrible thing happened. Just after dark I walked up to the mailbox, a few blocks away. On the way back home I passed a group of small, identical, red-brick houses, four of them, each with a low concrete porch and a triangular peak at the top. In one of these houses I saw him, sitting alone on the porch, with a ray of light from the inside hallway shining behind his head. I stopped involuntarily and gasped because his face seemed with the years to have become much larger. It was incredibly ugly and brutal, a fierce face, rather like a crocodile’s with wide, ponderous jaws, sleepy reptilian eyes, heavy, indolent features in horrible incompatibility with his fresh, pinkish skin. I walked on quickly without speaking, but my heart raced painfully, and I prayed I had not been recognized. When I reached my own house I was almost out of breath and rushed into the living room, believing I would ask what he was doing here in our neighborhood, what had happened to him in the last years. But I did none of these things. Instead I looked suspiciously at my mother, trying to decide why she hadn’t mentioned him or if she had forgotten that I once knew him.

“You devil, you witch!” I thought, enraged by her bland face and even despising the dark blue dress she wore with a frill of chaste white organdy at the neck.

“What’s the matter, sister?” she asked.

“Don’t call me
sister
,” I said, “it makes me feel like a fool. And if you want to know what’s wrong, I don’t like that dress you’re wearing. It isn’t good for you.”

“How funny. I’m always getting compliments on it. But, I don’t care one way or another.”

The face on the porch belonged to a young man I had not seen for years, but whom I had once thought myself in love with. Had he always looked so sinister, so bloated with ignorance and lethargy? I tried to remember a younger, healthier face with some brightness or pathos that had appealed to me, some gaiety and promise; anything except that large, iron, insentient image on the porch. But I remembered nothing comforting, not even one cool, happy afternoon in which he was different from the dark, hateful person living out some kind of life a few steps away from me. It was not love I had felt, not
really
love, I assured myself, but simply one of those incomprehensible youthful errors.

“Mama,” I said, “forgive me. The funny thing is that I honestly like that dress
better
than any you have.”

“Make up your mind,” she said with good humor. I said good night, but on the steps I turned around and saw my father looking at me, his blue eyes dark and strange with an infinite sadness.
He knows, he knows
, I decided. Men can sense these things. Let me die now.

I went to bed and in the darkness and stillness I felt the mere existence of the man I had seen to be sickeningly important to me. I was appalled by the undeniable fact that I had once been his slave, had awakened each morning with no thoughts except how I might please him. As two numb beasts we had found each other and created a romance. It was somehow better to believe that in him I had simply recognized an equal than to answer the shocking question as to why, if I was in any way his superior, I had been so violently attached to him.

It all came back to me: I had not only been in love with him, but he had required courage, daring, and cunning on my part. It had not been easy and I cannot excuse myself by saying we were “thrown together” when the truth is that every effort was made to tear us apart and only my mad-dog determination prevented that. And I began to hate my brother, my own flesh and blood, now dead, poor boy. It was he who started interfering and I can still see him, his face twisted with wonder and fear, saying, “How could you?” My brother’s case was weakened, even in his own mind, by his inability to accuse my friend of anything except frightening, depressing stupidity. Oh, is
that
all? I must have thought victoriously, because I continued to make clandestine engagements and took no interest in anyone else.

I heard my parents coming up the steps — thump, thump, closer and closer — and then like the killer in the movies they passed by the one marked for destruction and went to their own rooms. But this is impossible, impossible, I resolved; I must face it. (Self-analysis, bravery, objectivity. Is anything really
bad
?) Yet it was so difficult to recall those old days, almost beyond my powers to see myself again. I couldn’t even remember when I had first met that terrible creature. It seemed to have been in high school, some dull, immoral season, a kind of Indian summer romance. On the other hand, I had the weird and disturbing notion that I had known him since infancy, which is quite possible since he has lived off and on in our neighborhood or else we could not have gone to the same schools. In any case I remembered that he was literally not interested in anything, did his lessons with minimum competence and never became involved in anything he learned, never preferred one subject to another, since he was equally mediocre in all of them. He played sports but was not first-rate in any game, even though he was physically powerful.