The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (7 page)

A few other mortifying things flashed through my mind. His behavior had only two variations: he either went blindly through the days like a stupefied giant or then quite suddenly, as if bored by his own apathy, he would laugh at everything, burst forth in this rocking, strange sound as if some usually sluggish portion of his brain had flared up in a brief, dazzling moment. The laughter must have cost him great effort and he engaged in it only out of a rudimentary social instinct which at times told him that he owed the human race at least that raucous recognition. The other aspect of him I remembered was that, though he initiated nothing, things were always happening to him, one disaster after another. Violence erupted spontaneously in his presence and he was usually the victim. He was always either limping or wearing a bandage; he fell out of trees as a child, got shot in the leg when he was old enough to go hunting, lived through so many narrow escapes and calamities that finally shocks left no mark at all upon him.

But there must have been something else. What happened between us? No, no, merciful stars, not
that
! But yes, and on a gray, November afternoon, mad and dark, and as though I had just come into the world, an orphan, responsible to no one, magnificently free. Embraces and queer devotions, ironically mixed with that fine, beguiling notion of those years in which one thinks himself chosen from all people on earth for happiness. “I’ll love you always! Nothing can separate us!” And it was true, for in his anarchic face, in his nonhuman, reckless force, I saw the shadow of something lost, some wild, torrential passion lived out years and years before in my soul. How shameful! What unutterable, beautiful chaos! Yes, it was he, he, image of all the forgone sin that forever denies innocence. Nothing can ever separate us.

How I regretted that walk to the mailbox to send a letter to New York. If I hadn’t done that there is at least a good possibility that I might never have seen him again and might have been spared that long night in which I tried to account for humiliating days and emotions. I couldn’t sleep at all and yet I didn’t want the night to pass because it seemed to me that once morning came everyone in town would remember what kind of man I first fell in love with.

I looked up the dark street in the direction of his house and thought, suppose, great heavens, that I had married him. This idea completely unnerved me because I had wanted to marry him and would have done so if he had not violated one of those rigid, adolescent, feminine laws. I finally broke with him only because he went away for three days and didn’t write to me on each of them. His infidelity crushed me and with real anguish I forced myself to say, “My heart is utterly broken. If you don’t care enough for me to keep your promises....” The thought of the risk I had taken chilled me to the bone. I might at this moment have been asleep in his house, my stupid head pressed against his chest, touching the stony curve of his chin.

At last I dozed off and when I awakened late the next morning there was great commotion downstairs. We were going on a picnic. I threw myself into the preparations so gleefully that my mother was taken aback and said, “If you like picnics so much I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned them before.”

Another week has passed and I have found the temerity to see some of my old friends. They are all somewhat skeptical of me but not for the right reasons. It is a great relief to learn that I am thought of only as “radical” and though I know that is not meant to be a compliment it seems quite the happiest way out and so I try to keep that aspect of my past in the public mind on the theory that nice people demand only one transgression and if they find a suitable sin they won’t go snooping around for more. Perhaps I have overplayed it a little, become too dogmatic and angry. (Extremes of any sort embarrass small-town people. They are dead set against overexertion and for that reason even opera singers and violinists make them uncomfortable because it seems a pity the notes won’t come forth without all that fuss and foolishness.)

Even I was taken in by my act and it did seem to me that when I lived here I thought only of politics. One afternoon, overwhelmed by nostalgia and yearning for the hopeful, innocent days in which we used to talk about the “vanguard of the future,” I went to the old courthouse. Here our radical group, some six or seven snoring people on a good night, used to meet. I found the courthouse unchanged; it is still the same hideous ruin with the familiar dirt and odor of perspiring petitioners and badgered drunks who have filed in and out for a hundred years, the big spittoons, the sagging staircase. When I left I heard the beautiful bells ringing to announce that it was five o’clock and I went home in a lyrical mood, admitting that I had spent many happy, ridiculous days in this town.

For some reason I could not wait to reach the garage next to our house where my father keeps his fishing equipment. I saw there the smooth poles painted in red and green stripes and I intended to rush into the house, throw my arms around my father’s neck, and tell him how many times in New York I had thought of him bent over his workbench, and that I despised myself for criticizing him for going fishing instead of trying to make money.

But just as I stepped upon the back porch I stopped and pretended to be admiring an old fat hen which the neighbors had intended to kill long ago but hadn’t found the heart to do so because the hen has a human aspect and keeps looking at them gaily and as an equal. I was not thinking about the hen; I was wondering, of course, why my family hadn’t mentioned that my friend was living on the street. We had spent many hours talking about new tenants, deaths and births, who had become alcoholic or been sent to the asylum. It wasn’t like my mother, a talented gossip, to forget such an arrival, and I concluded sorrowfully that she remembered all my lies and tricks and thought me guilty of the one, unforgivable wrong. Yet when I finally entered the house my family was in such a good mood I hadn’t the nerve to mention my suspicions. Perhaps they want to forget me, I thought. Silly, proud people who must see the broad face of the boy on the street and recoil, thinking, “Oh, my sweet daughter! What dreadful horrors she was born with....Some genes from an old Tennessee reprobate who cropped up in the family, passed on, and now wants to live again in her.”

I will force nothing, I decided. It will all come out and then I shall leave forever, vanish, change my name, and begin over again in Canada.

Several nights later I went to visit a friend in the neighborhood, a girl who weighs over two hundred pounds and who is so fearful of becoming a heavy, cheerful clown that she is, instead, a mean-spirited monster. And yet her malice, which is of a metropolitan order, is often quite entertaining, and I might have stayed longer if I had not begun to imagine the inspired tales she could tell on me. Her small eyes seemed to contain all my secrets and I could see her plump, luxurious mouth forming the syllables of misdeeds even I could not name. At nine o’clock I went home where I found the house dark and supposed my family had gone out for a few minutes, perhaps to the drugstore or across town to the ice-cream factory. This was the moment at last. I felt it acutely.

There he was, sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette. I realized it was he the moment I saw the figure, the wide, slumping shoulders, the head turned somewhat to the side. Even in the dark I felt his slow, calm, somnolent gaze on me.

“Is that you?” he asked in a low, untroubled voice that is unlike any I have ever heard before. It seems to come at you from a great distance, rolling like a wave.

“Yes, it is,” I answered lightly and in exactly the opposite way I had planned. But after I had spoken so hospitably I began to worry about my family. They might return at any moment, and I couldn’t bear them to find him here, couldn’t endure their curious glances, questions, and recollections of the past.

“Don’t bother me!” I said rapidly. “I don’t want to see you. What are you doing living around here anyway? It isn’t fair for me to come home to this....I’m different now.”

I could see his face quite well now and apparently he too had changed because he actually registered an emotion. He looked at me with disgust, his mouth opening slowly and curiously, his lazy eyes blinking at me reproachfully.

“Bother you?” he said. “What do you mean? Come back to what?”

I began to tremble with impatience. “Don’t you see?” I whispered desperately. “I don’t want them to know I’ve seen you again. It would just start up the old argument.”

He put his hand on my arm to steady me and I looked angrily into his wide, immobile face. It was not frightening, but simply infuriating for it had a kind of prehistoric, dumb strength, so that he looked like some Neanderthal ruler, superb and forceful in a savage way, and quite eternal. My ghastly darling.

“Never mind. Dear God, it’s too late now,” I said, because I saw the car driving up in front of the house and in a fit of weakness I sat down beside him on the steps and buried my face in my hands.

I did not look up when I heard my parents saying something dryly and politely, saying nothing much because they sounded tired and sleepy. The perspiration on my forehead dampened my hands, but somehow I was able to stand up and bid my old friend good night. I smiled at him and he returned this last gesture shyly, and turning away his eyes seemed in the evening light a soft, violet color.

As I went into the hall I stopped before the mirror and saw that my cheeks were burning and that there was something shady and subtly disreputable in my face. My mother was taking the hairpins out of her hair. The great mysterious drama had passed, but I knew that I could not stay at home any longer.

The next day I prepared to leave and I noted with astonishment that I had been at home nineteen days. We packed my bags, and my mother said she thought the trip had done me good. “You’re not quite as nervous as when you arrived,” she observed.

“Not as nervous!” I said. “I’m a wreck!”

“Well, go on back to New York if it makes you feel better,” she said wearily.

“I don’t feel exactly wonderful there — ”

“There’s only one answer to that,” my mother said, slamming the door as she walked out of the room. “There must be something wrong with
you
!”

I ran to the door and opened it so that she would be certain to hear me. “If there is something wrong with me it’s your fault,” I said triumphantly.

“Mine!” she called back. “What madness!”

For some reason this altercation put me in a good humor. Now that I was leaving my feelings shifted every five seconds from self-pity to the gushiest love and affection. I even began to think how nice it was at home, how placid. My father came in and I could tell from the serious expression on his face that he was thinking of important matters. I’m sure he meant to make me very happy but he had a way of expressing himself that was often misleading and so, with the most tender look in his eyes, he informed me that
in spite of everything
they all liked me very much. I graciously let that pass because I was, in my thoughts, already wondering whether once I was away, home would again assume its convenient sinister shape.

There was only one thing left to do in Kentucky, a little ritual which I always liked to put off until the end. My mother mistakenly believes that I mourn my dead brother and tomorrow morning there will still be time before the train leaves to drive out to the cemetery where he lies. The pink and white dogwood will be flowering and the graves will be surrounded by tulips and lilacs. At this time of the year the cemetery is magnificent, and my mother will not let me miss the beauty. When we get there she will point to the family lot and say, “Sister, I hate to think of you alone in New York, away from your family. But you’ll come back to us. There’s a space for you next to Brother....In the nicest part....So shady and cool.”

And so it is, as they say, comforting to have these roots.

1948

“Do you really love me?” Edgar would ask when I lay in his arms criticizing him.

“Well...Yes and no, honey...” I would answer.

Dear, darling Edgar! His silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in the hand. His cheerfulness — in a soft voice he nearly always hummed a little tune, as other people vaguely chew, and with him one had the cozy feeling of a radio softly playing away in a corner. His generous, warm nature, immune to insult in a delightful fashion, quite disarming.

What was I, my head happily pressed against his chest, criticizing in him? Everything! For his edification I took him apart nightly, as if his character were a bad novel. I seem to remember telling myself that it would be quite “dishonest” not to let him have it to the full. He would sigh and even sometimes fall asleep as I, incorrigibly driven to self-expression, would descend step by step from his soul to his clothes like a tired performer running out of material but unwilling to give up the stage. “The way you dress isn’t quite right, sweetheart! You’ve never really got the point of it all somehow. Only very good clothes grow more charming with age. A perfectly commonplace jacket from an old double-breasted suit just has to be thrown away when it’s old!”

I have not seen Edgar for some years. When I think of him now it is always with pleasure, for the truth is that although I have met many nice and kind people I have never known anyone to be so nice
to me
. Recently I was reminded of him again when I came across some old scraps of fiction in which he figured, hardly disguised at all, and naturally not in what is called a favorable light. Reading these bits over I was struck by their remoteness from the truth. They are simply my lowest opinion. Perhaps even if I had wished to make Edgar sound less dreary a strange vanity would have prevented me from doing so. Nothing, says Valéry, so much gives a
psychological air
as the habit of depreciating.

Here is one of my abandoned bits of “depreciation.” And now hard I worked on this little picture of Edgar and myself!

“There were other young men around, all callow and boring, who reminded me that I was going to have a difficult time finding a husband. I judged people mercilessly and yet I had a sharp longing for an ideal companion or, when I was depressed and lowered my demands, ‘just someone to talk to.’ And of course there was someone. At eight in the evening I was dressed, a touch of cologne on my neck, red polish on my nails, and I felt excited and relieved that he was coming,
my sweetheart
, whom I honestly liked hardly at all. His name was Edgar Mason, a political-science teacher at the university. He had been coming in the evening for three years and everyone pronounced me lucky to have such a decent fellow in love with me, waiting for me to make up my mind, ‘not half bad-looking,’ quite popular. If he happened to be ten minutes late I found with surprise that this made me very impatient and unhappy, although when he finally arrived, when I at last saw his car driving up to my house, my mood changed horribly. As I went down the stairs I was overcome by such lassitude I could hardly manage a pleasant greeting. Fortunately, my suitor was not of a resentful nature. He took my moods as he took the weather, a subject for comment but not for emotion.