"Vodka Martini? What on earth is that? This one is gin with a dash of vermouth."
Displaying my newly acquired knowledge, I told her that vodka could be used instead of gin.
"Isn't that amusing? We must try it." She rang for the butler. "John," she asked him, "is there any vodka in the house?"
"Yes, madam."
"Then make Mr. Ross a Martini with vodka instead of gin." She turned to me. "French or Italian vermouth? With or without an olive?"
"French vermouth, I think. And yes please, an olive. But don't go to any trouble—gin will be perfectly all right"
"No, no. We must always be willing to learn. Make one for me, too, John. I'll give it a try."
I saw that my sheltered old lady was a drinker and only hoped she wouldn't be too far gone when we got to Silvers'.
John served the Martinis. "Chin-chin," said Mrs. Whymper merrily.
She emptied half the glass at one gulp. "Good!" she said. "We'll have to include that in our repertory, John. It's excellent"
"Certainly, madam."
"Who gave you the recipe?" she asked me.
"A man who claims that vodka can't be smelled on the breath."
"Really? How amusing. Have you ever experimented? Is it true?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter to me."
"Really? Haven't you someone who might care?"
I laughed. "No. All the people I know are drinkers."
Mrs. Whymper eyed me, tilting her head like a bird. "It's good for the heart," she said out of a clear sky. "And it clears the head. Shall we each have another little one for the road?"
'I'd be glad to," I said reluctantly, foreseeing an interminable series of little ones for the road. But I was wrong. After the first, Mrs. Whymper stood up and rang.
"Is the car outside, John?"
"Yes, madam."
"Splendid. Then we shall call on Mr. Silvers."
Transformed into a chauffeur, John opened (he door of the Cadillac for us. It seemed to me that I wasn't doing so badly in the car department—a Rolls and a Cadillac, both with chauffeurs, in so short a time. My eye lit on a portable bar similar to the one in the Rolls. I fully expected Mrs. Whymper to offer more refreshment, but she didn't. Instead, she struck up a conversation about Paris and the provinces in rather halting French. I replied in the same language, partly to please her and partly because it gave me a certain advantage over her. I thought that might come in handy later on.
I expected Silvers to send me away after the first few moments, so as to have an open field for his own charm. But Mrs. Whymper kept addressing her remarks to me, as often as not in French. After a while I asked her if she would care for a vodka Martini. She clapped her hands. Silvers looked at me disapprovingly; he wouldn't have minded serving Scotch, but everything else struck him as barbarous. I said Mrs. Whymper's physician had forbidden Scotch and went into the kitchen, where, with the cook's help, I finally located a bottle of vodka.
"You drink this stuff in the afternoon?" she asked me.
"Not me. The customers."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
It was apparently my fate to be held responsible for other people's failings. I stood by the kitchen window and sent the cook in with the two Martinis and Scotch for Silvers. Some pigeons had settled on the window ledge. New York was as full of pigeons as Venice. I felt the coolness of the windowpane against my forehead. When the cook came back, I went to my observation post in the storeroom. Silvers had brought in some small Renoirs. That surprised me. Ordinarily he liked to make it clear that he had an assistant to perform these menial tasks.
A few minutes later he came to me. "You've forgotten your cocktail," he said. "Come in."
Mrs. Whymper had drained her glass. "Ah, there you are," she said. "Unfaithful so soon? Or are you afraid of your own Martinis?"
She sat straight as a die, looking very much like a doll. But there was nothing soft or doll-like about her hands. They were thin, hard, and bony. "What do you think of the little Renoir?" she asked.
It was a still life with flowers, done about 1880. "It's wonderful," I said. "We'll have a hard time finding anything comparable when it's sold."
Mrs. Whymper said, "Shall we have one more for the road?"
I went back to the kitchen.
"You've made them so big," she said when I returned with the two Martinis, and downed hers at one gulp. "Mr. Silvers tells me you would like to hang the picture for me. Thank you so much. See you tomorrow at five."
The Martinis had had no visible effect on her. I saw her to the car. The air was still hot but there was an evening breeze, and the sound of rustling leaves in the park made me think of palm trees.
I went back in. "Why didn't you tell me who it was?" said Silvers in his tone of deepest boredom. "Of course I know Mrs. Whymper."
I bit my lip. "I did tell you."
"There are so many Whympers. You didn't tell me it was Mrs. André Whymper. I've known her for years. Oh well, it doesn't matter."
"I hope you won't hold it against me," I said, mustering all my sarcasm.
"Why should I hold it against you?"
"Anyway," I said, "she seems to hâve bought something."
Silvers made a gesture as though chasing a fly. "That's not so certain," he said. "These old ladies are always returning things—it ruins the frames, and in the end they don't buy. This business isn't as simple a you think." Silvers yawned. "Let's call it a day. This heat is fatiguing. See you tomorow. Put the picture away before you. go."
And off he went I stood dumbfounded. The scoundrel! I thought Trying to cheat me out of my commission by saying he'd known her all along! I took the three Renoirs he had shown back to the storeroom. Two were portraits of young women. I could see that Mrs. Whymper, who had made such frantic efforts to look like a youthful mummy, wouldn't have wanted them in the house. I locked the doors and brought the keys to Mrs. Silvers.
"Is the coast clear?" she asked.
"All clear," I said.
"Then I can finally take a bath."
When I turned the corner, there was the Rolls-Royce outside the hotel. I had been wondering where to take Natasha that evening. Every place I could think of seemed too hot The Rolls was the solution.
"Have you got it till after theater?" I asked.
"Longer. Until midnight At midnight it must be outside El Morocco."
"You, too?"
"Both of us. How did it go with Mrs. Whymper?"
"Fine. She bought a nice little Renior that will look very well in her doll's house."
"Doll's house," said Natasha, laughing. "That doll, who looks as if she could only open and close her china-blue eyes and smile helplessly at the world, is president of two important corporations. And nothing honorary about it. She knows her stuff."
"Really?"
"You have a lot to learn about women in America."
"Natasha," I said, "the only woman I want to know anything about is right here beside me."
To my surprise she blushed to the roots of her hair. "Mrs. Whymper seems to have had a good effect on you," she said. "I'll have to find some more like her."
"Let's drive up the Hudson past the George Washington Bridge," said Natasha. "Maybe there'll be a place where we can sit outside in the moonlight and watch the boats go by."
She pressed close to me. I felt her hair and her cool warmth. Even on these hot days she never seemed to perspire.
"Were you a good journalist?" she asked.
"No, strictly second-rate."
"And now you can't write any more?"
"Who would I write for? My English isn't good enough. I haven't been able to write in a long time."
"Then you're like a pianist without a piano?"
"You could put it that way. Has your unknown patron left you something to drink?"
"Well take a look. You dont like to talk about yourself, do you?"
"Not especially."
"I can understand that. Not even about your
present job?"
"As tout and errand boy?"
Natasha opened the bottle compartment "You see," she said. "We're shadows. Strange shadows of the past Will it ever be different? This is Polish vodka. I wonder how it got here. Poland doesn't even exist any more."
"No," I said bitterly. "Poland doesn't exist, but Polish vodka has survived. Should we laugh about it or cry?"
"We should drink it darling."
She produced two glasses and filled them. The vodka was cold and very good.
"Could you enlist," she asked, "if you wanted to?"
"No," I said. "Nobody wants me. You're right. I'm neither fish nor flesh, but it was the same in Europe. Next to Europe this is paradise. The paradise of an involuntary spectator. Oh, Natasha, let's not talk about what we've lost but about what we have left. Look at the moon."
For a time we were silent. I cursed myself for being so idiotically ponderous. I was behaving like a man I had met at El Morocco. He had wept bitter tears over the fate of France; he even seemed to be sincere, but that didn't prevent him from being ridiculous.
Suddenly Natasha turned to me. Her eyes were shining. We were approaching the bridge. "How beautiful it is!"
She had completely forgotten our gloomy conversation. I had seen that a number of times. She was quick to understand and quick to forget, which was lucky for an elephant like me with a long memory for misfortune and a very short one for happiness.
"I worship you," I said. "Here, now, under this moon and beside this river that flows into the sea and reflects hundreds and thousands of shattered moons. I worship you and no fear of platitudes can stop me from saying that the George Washington Bridge shines like a diadem over the restless Hudson and that I wish it were really a diadem and I were Rockefeller or Napoleon to make you a present of it I know it's childish of me, but I had to say it."
"Why childish? Can't you just let yourself go? And if it is childish, don't you know that women lap such childishness up?"
"I'm a born coward. I have to say these things to keep up my courage."
I kissed her. "I wish I had a driver's license. Then we could drop our chaperon off at a bar. It's like being in Madrid with a dueña always trailing along behind us, except that this one is in front of us."
She laughed. "He's not in our way. He doesn't know a word of French, except 'Madame.' "
"You think he's not in our way?"
"Darling," she murmured, "that's the misery of a big city. One is practically never alone."
"How do people make children in this town?"
"God only knows."
I tapped on the partition. "Please stop over there by the park," I said to the chauffeur and handed him a five-dollar bill. "Go and get yourself some dinner. And pick us up in an hour."
"Yes, sir."
"You see!" said Natasha.
The car vanished into the darkness. Hundreds of radios blared at us from the open windows beyond the park. It was a very small park, littered with Coca-Cola bottles, beer cans, and ice-cream wrappers, and alive with howling children.
"Good God," said Natasha. "And the driver won't be back for an hour."
"We could take a walk by the river."
"But look at the crowds. And how can I walk in these shoes?"
In the light of a street lamp I saw the foursquare radiator of a Rolls-Royce. I ran out and waved my arms like a windmill. Sure enough, it was our driver, who had miraculously turned back. A friend and savior—I would never have mean thoughts about him again. Like so many idealists, I loved humanity but was much less fond of people. Natasha's eyes sparkled with repressed laughter. "Now what?" she asked. "Where can we eat?"
"How about the Blue Ribbon?" the chauffeur suggested. "It's cool and the Sauerbraten is first-rate."
"Sauerbraten?" I said.
"Sauerbraten," he repeated. "First-rate."
"I'm damned if I've crossed the ocean to eat Sauerbraten or sauerkraut," I said to Natasha. "Let's go to Third Avenue; there are lots of places there."
"What would you say to the King of the Sea, sir?" The chauffeur knew his way around.
"That sounds cool," I said. "Good. The King of the Sea it is."
When we arrived, we flung ourselves into our seats as if we had had a long journey behind, us. I decided not to go to El Morocco with Natasha. I wasn't eager to meet any more of her friends.
XVI
I had a lunch date with Kahn, and he took me to a Chinese restaurant. He had acquired a taste for Chinese food in Paris, but, he assured me, the restaurants in Chinatown surpassed his wildest dreams.
We took the bus to Mott Street. The restaurant was in a basement, "Isn't it odd," said Kahn, "how few Chinese women you see in New York? Either the men keep them locked up or they've solved the problem of spontaneous reproduction. Children all over the place, but no women. Too bad, because they're the most wonderful women in the world."
"In novels?"
"In China."
"Have you been there?" I asked.
"Yes, for two years. From 1928 to 1930."
"Why did you come back?"
Kahn laughed. "Homesickness. The Jews have always been such German patriots."
We ordered fried shrimp. "How's Carmen?" I asked. "She looks like a cross between a Polynesian and a Chinese. Tropical and tragic."
"She was born in Pomerania. You wouldn't know it because, luckily, she's Jewish."
"She looks as if she came from Timbuctoo, Hong Kong, and Papeete."
"Mentally, she's from Dogpatch. A fascinating mixture. Real stupidity is so fascinating because it's unpredictable. I can more or less imagine how you would react in a given situation. With Carmen it's out of the question. She's not,, as you suppose, a romantic mixture from Yokohama, Canton, and the Spice Islands. Her origins are much more remote: maybe the craters of the moon—anyway some archetypal home of pure timeless stupidity, a place to which you and I can never find our way back. Every moment is as fresh and new to her as the first day of the Creation, and she herself is always fresh and new. Nothing troubles her, doubts are unknown to her, she is what she is, and basta. Won't you have another portion of shrimp? They're marvelous. To make up for it, we can go without dessert It's no good anyway—litchi nuts and those silly cookies with the fortunes inside."
"Fine."
"Stupidity is a precious possession," Kahn went on. "Once lost, it can never be recovered. It protects you; you don't see the shoals that intelligence comes to grief on. I once gave myself a course in stupidity. I worked hard at it and made good progress—without it some of my little tricks in France would have turned out very badly for me. But obviously, acquired stupidity is only a pathetic substitute for the genuine article, especially the genuine article combined with a face that -might have been made for Duse. And, what's more, in a Jewess. Really stupid Jews are as rare as spotted zebras."
"I wouldn't say that. The Jews are a sentimental, trusting people with a gift for business and the arts. They're clever, but not always intelligent. Far from it."
Kahn grinned. "Really stupid, I said. I'm speaking of a Parsifalian, almost saintly stupidity."
I gulped. His identification of Carmen with Parsifal or Lohengrin was so incongruous that I felt there must be some truth in it. I had a weakness for abstruse allusions and had spent a good deal of my time in Brussels thinking them up. They still had the power to put me in a good humor. They were like the sacred flash of enlightenment in the Zen religion. "How are you otherwise?" I asked. "How's business?"
"I'm bored," said Kahn, looking around. There were no Chinese except for the waiters. Stout perspiring businessmen were making clumsy attempts to eat with chopsticks. Kahn handled his with the elegance of a mandarin. "I'm hopelessly bored," he said. "Business is good. In a few years I could be sales manager; later on I might buy into the business, and even end up owning it. Beautiful prospect, isn't it?"
"In France we'd have found the idea very attractive."
"Because it was only an idea. In France security
looked like the most beautiful thing on earth. But there's an enormous difference between an idea and its realization. Once you've got security, you see it for what it really is: boredom. Do you know what I think? That living like gypsies all those years ruined us for bourgeois ideals."
I laughed. "Not all of us. For a lot of refugees the gypsy life was something to be endured and got over with. They were like bank clerks who'd been forced to perform on the flying trapeze. As soon as they could climb down, they went back to their ledgers."
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