by D. W. Buffa
“They use a couple of them now for dormitories, student housing. There isn’t much call anymore for summer resorts on the south side of Chicago. It’s too bad, really.” She opened a rickety dark brown screen door. “Some of the hotels were quite wonderful: I lost my virginity in one of them. The Windemere, I think it was.” She said this in a slightly puzzled voice, as if she wished she could remember, but could not really be sure. Her wintry eyes were full of mischief, and I knew that she had not forgotten a thing.
“You’re from New York?” she asked as she removed a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator and poured us each a glass.
I followed her out of the kitchen into the dining room, where we sat at a ponderous dark wooden table with round thick legs. There were only two chairs, one at the end and one just around the corner at what would normally have been the first place on the left. Scholarly books with long and obscure titles, writing paper covered with a precise and calibrated longhand flourish, pages of double-spaced and frequently corrected typescript were strewn across it in the careless haphazard fashion of a work in progress.
“Just shove that aside,” she said as if the stack of handwritten notes in front of me had no more value than last week’s newspaper. “My lecture,” she remarked.
Closing her eyes, she held the icy glass against the side of her taut, wrinkled cheek. It seemed to relax her. A languid, almost sensuous smile crossed her parchment mouth. “Yes, at my age,” she said as she opened her eyes and set down the glass. “How exactly can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? You’re from New York?” she asked again, looking at me with extreme interest. “That’s where I’m from—originally. New York—there’s no place quite like it. Wouldn’t you agree? Is that where you’re from?” she reached for the typed manuscript, ten pages or so that, following her instruction, I had pushed toward the center of the table, away from my glass. As she held it in her hands, I noticed a slight tremble. Then I realized that it was always there, and that the constant barely discernible motion of her head, which at first I had attributed to an intense interest, was symptomatic of the same palsied condition, the same decline, gradual, irreversible, and cruel.
“‘Tolstoy’s Unacknowledged Indebtedness to Rousseau.’” She raised her eyes, certain I would understand the daring significance of it. Or was that what she wanted me to think? That she assumed she could talk to me about her work as an equal when she assumed nothing of the sort. There was something comfortable, assuring and not entirely honest about the way she enveloped you with that look of hers, as if she understood a part of you that until you saw that look you had not quite known was there. It was uncanny, the way she made you feel that you were discovering something about yourself, but only by seeing it first through another person’s eyes. It had happened to me before, a long time ago. I had forgotten about it, forgotten that serious and at the same time strangely whimsical look. Now, when I saw it again, I remembered more than the look, I remembered the eyes; and it seemed to me that I was seeing them again, the same eyes a second time, this time in the woman who had had them first.
“I suppose I might call it ‘Plagiarism Pure and Simple,’ but that loses a little of the precision, a little of the subtlety, don’t you think?” she sat perfectly erect, an indulgent smile on her dry, desiccated lips. There was something about the way she held herself: the high neck, the loose-limbed broad shoulders, the light-filled eyes, the strong yet somehow vulnerable mouth, the ever-trembling hands; the way her voice seemed to quiver into a kind of breathless silence at the end; the way each question she asked sounded like a personal appeal, that reminded me of the way I had remembered an aging and majestic Katharine Hepburn. It was impossible not to like her; impossible not to fall under her spell.
“Do you think I’m too old to keep doing this, Mr. Antonelli?” She held her head back at an angle. “No one here seems to think so. It’s one of the things that make this place different; one of the reasons some of us—the ones who have been here the longest—love it so much.
The University of Chicago has the peculiar idea that it just might be possible that the mind is worth more than the body; and that the gradual decline of the one may not be inconsistent with the continuing, and perhaps even increasing, power of the other. You may die here, Mr. Antonelli; but you don’t retire here: because at the point when you can’t work, can’t do what you were put here to do, you should die. Or, rather, your body should die. The mind never dies; not if it has been part of the conversation.” she smiled at my dense, puzzled expression. “The conversation that goes on over the centuries with the minds that knew how to think. Do you think Aristotle is really dead? Open the Metaphysics and see if you don’t find yourself talking to him, questioning him, finding answers. Anyway, that’s what we do here: ask questions of people like Rousseau who once wrote—Why did he write?—‘If you want to live beyond your century.’”
“How long have you been here, at the University of Chicago, Mrs. Malreaux?”
A thin smile creased the corner of her mouth.
Leaning forward, her back arched straight, she placed her right elbow on the table. With her middle and index fingers spread along the side of her face, she joined her thumb and two remaining fingers at the apex of her chin. The smile began to float, slip sideways across her mouth.
“The university was founded in 1892. Sometime after that.” She tilted her head to an angle a little more acute.
“It isn’t ‘Mrs. Malreaux.’ I never married. Call me Vivian. How can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? Why did you want to see me?”
It seemed impossible that she did not know, but it was clear that she had no idea why I had come.
“I knew your daughter, Ms. Malreaux. We were in law school together, and…”
Her gaze became curious, intense and alert; but there was also a sense of confusion and an instinctive reserve.
Why would someone who had known her daughter in law school want to see her now, after all this time? “You knew Anna at Harvard. You were in the same class?”
“No, she was a year behind me. I was Thomas Browning’s roommate.”
This seemed to put her again at her ease. “Ah, yes— Thomas.” She searched my eyes, waiting for me to explain.
“I’m representing Jimmy Haviland.”
The name produced the same look of recognition in her eyes; but this time there was more than the acknowledgment of a fact: There was a feeling of sympathy and understanding that had been absent at the mention of Browning’s name.
“Why would Jimmy need representation?” she asked with a worried glance. “He can’t have done anything wrong. Not the Jimmy Haviland I remember.”
How could she not have heard? The rumored involvement of the vice president of the United States in a criminal cover-up had made it one of the most widely covered stories in the country. She must have read about it, and then, with the faltering memory of age, simply forgotten.
“It’s been in all the papers, all over the television,” I began to explain, looking down at my hands with a growing sense of embarrassment.
Instead of the blank look of forgetfulness I expected, I looked up to find her half laughing at what I had said.
“I’m afraid I don’t read the papers, Mr. Antonelli.” she threw me a glance terrific in its cheerful indifference to what the world thought important. “I’m eighty-two years old: What new thing do you think I should follow with interest? And as for television… Why would I? Why would anyone? But, please,” she went on, anxious to get back to the question she had raised, “tell me about Jimmy Haviland. What’s happened?”
“He’s been indicted for murder.”
With stoic reserve she kept hidden whatever reaction she had. She knew there was more to it, and she waited for me to tell her what it was.
“They claim that Annie’s death wasn’t an accident; that it was murder; that Jimmy pushed her out the window.”
Vivian Malreaux threw up her hands. “In a long life in which I have seen stupidities of eve
ry description, that is unquestionably the single stupidest thing I’ve ever heard suggested. I would have pushed her out a window before Jimmy ever could have. Why are they doing this? They can’t possibly believe it’s true.”
Vivian Malreaux stared straight ahead, bleak, disconsolate, angry. She lifted her chin and, as if she were trying to hide them, folded her palsied hands in her lap. A brief shudder passed through her. She clenched her hands into fists and beat them in soft despair against the hard wooden table. With her mouth twisted into a knot, she slowly shook her head.
“I used to tell Anna she was going to ruin Jimmy Haviland’s life,” she said in a bitter, anguished voice.
“He was so in love with her, it was almost painful to watch. It was not her fault, of course—a lot of young men were in love with her, or thought they were. But Jimmy was different. He loved her too much. I saw it right away, the first time I met him: the way he looked at her, trying so hard to figure out what she wanted, how he could please her. He loved her too much. If he had loved her less, he would have known that he was doing all the wrong things, that he should have kept a certain distance, made her think he wasn’t spending all his time thinking about her.”
Vivian Malreaux threw me a significant look.
She wanted me to understand that the judgment she was about to pass was not quite so cruel as it might at first sound.
“In the end, of course, it would not have changed things. Jimmy Haviland was in love with something he could not have. Anna was never going to be in love with him. But it would have made him depend less on how she felt and left him something of himself.”
A smile, strange, mysterious and profound, flashed through her eyes. “I imagine something like that happened to you once, Mr. Antonelli. Something tragic,” she remarked, lowering her eyes to spare me the embarrassment of a reply.
“In some people, tragedy deepens the soul, makes them see things in a different light. It makes sense out of the world, this terrible knowledge that terrible things happen, that there are no happy endings, that we can’t know—not really know—what fate has waiting for us. But other people—people like Jimmy Haviland— never recover from it. They can never quite believe it really happened, that the world could be that unfair, that life can be that unjust. I knew it when I saw him, saw the way Anna had become his whole world. I knew it was going to end badly; I knew that he was going to have his heart broken. What I didn’t know was that it was going to happen twice.” she held her head high, rigid, yielding as little as she could to the palsied tremors that laid siege to her mouth.
Her face was like a raw winter wind, cold, desolate, unforgiving. Her eyes searched relentlessly through the layered past to that moment when, once she had it, she could recall as easily, as clearly, as if she were reciting it from the written page of a well-written book.
“Jimmy called. That’s how I learned Anna was dead.
Jimmy called.” There was a long, stringent pause. Her eyes half closed, she rubbed the palm of her right hand with the thumb of her left. “I think I knew it before he said anything; I knew it from the sobbing gasp in his voice when he tried to speak my name; I knew it when he tried to say Anna’s name and broke down completely.
He came here; he helped me with all the arrangements; he was quite brave. He came here because he thought he should try to help me; he came here, and I did what I could to try to help him.”
A sad and wistful smile floated over the straight, fragile, trembling ruins of the mouth of Vivian Malreaux. Her voice was hesitant, sympathetic, the echo of vanished things that linger forever, clear and vivid, in the quiet and aching memory of the mind.
“He asked her to marry him. She broke his heart when she said no. But Jimmy Haviland was one of those rare, decent beings that I think you don’t find so often anymore, someone who believed—really believed—that it wasn’t quite possible to love anyone as much as he loved her and not have her love him back.”
The wistful smile, become more hopeful, hovered a moment longer, began to dim, and then, sadly and irretrievably, died out. Her remarkable eyes appeared to pull back from some fixed point in front of her and cast about for something else to hold, some other place from which to begin.
“He was right: Love is never unrequited, not entirely.
That’s the rub, of course—that ‘not entirely.’ Jimmy loved her with all his heart, and Anna loved him because of it.” she turned her head suddenly and gave me a sharp, searching look. “Anna did love him. She loved him because of how much he loved her—not because he was in love with her, but because he was capable of it, of being that much in love with someone. She envied that a little, that capacity to feel like that about someone; it was not a capacity she had. She was too much a woman for that.”
“‘Too much a woman for that’?” I blurted out, astonished at what she had said. “What do you mean?— ‘too much a woman for that.’”
With a kind of luxurious self-indulgence, an enigmatic smile curled along the corner of her mouth. With two fingers of her left hand she gently touched her chin.
“Anna understood the changeable nature of things; that what you feel today you may not feel tomorrow, and you almost certainly won’t feel next year or the year after that. She understood, not that love doesn’t last, but that love changes what it means. Jimmy Haviland was in love with her—Thomas Browning was in love with her— there were a lot of young men in love with her—and they all wanted to marry her; but marriage, if it means anything, means possession, and she was not able to do that, be possessed by someone. She understood herself too well for that; understood herself too well as a woman for that.”
I was still confused, but not so much that I did not see the flaw, the error she had made. Vivian Malreaux said she had never married. Annie had been born out of wedlock when that sort of thing did not pass unnoticed or always go unpunished. Vivian Malreaux’s objections to marriage had undoubtedly been based on a serious conviction, but what may once have been a reasonable analysis of the oppression of women seemed as dated as the Victorian furniture that filled the house in which she lived.
“Do you really think marriage is about possession?” I asked, hiding my incredulity behind a mask of polite interest. To my further astonishment, she laughed.
“Only when it works,” she said, her eyes shining at my shocked and helpless stare. “It’s why marriage has become an impossibility; why it isn’t anything more than a temporary arrangement by which two parties agree to have sex and make money.” She looked at me with a kind of gleeful mischief. “Marriage ended sometime in the nineteenth century. It did not just end because the economic situation of women changed and they became more independent, more self-sufficient; and it did not just end because it became easier—a lot easier—to get a divorce. Why did divorce become easier? Because women acquired an equal status in the law. But once women had an equal right to all the protections of the law, and all the economic opportunities of the marketplace, a woman was no longer an object, no longer dependent for her existence, her livelihood, her happiness on anyone but herself. She was not an object: She could not be possessed. But if she could not be possessed—if she could only belong to herself—how could a man believe that she belonged to him? And if she didn’t belong to him—if she was not a part, an ineradicable part, of himself—how could he ever protect her with the same fierce passion with which he would protect his own life? How could he have about her the same kind of instinct of possession and responsibility that she—that any woman—has about her child? “It is the vanity of our age, Mr. Antonelli: We keep thinking we can change the very nature of things and that there won’t be anything lost. Marriage died a hundred years ago when women were set free to do what they liked, because then of course men were free to do the same thing. Now everyone has their rights and, it seems to me, not much else. I did not marry, Mr. Antonelli. I was not about to belong to someone else; and because, to be quite frank about it, the kind of man who would have settled for anything less simpl
y did not interest me very much.”
“But you had a…”
“A child?” With a slight movement of her head she acknowledged the force of this entirely conventional objection. “You assume I was asked.” She rested her chin on top of her fingers, closed partway into a crippled, arthritic fist. A restless smile moved along the shadow of her mouth. “You assume Anna’s father knew he was Anna’s father. You assume…” she gave a start like someone suddenly aware of her own bad habit, smiled a silent apology and rose from the table. She stood behind the chair, both hands on top of it, looking down at me.
“I might have married Anna’s father, if he had survived the war. Perhaps he did. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to them, any of them, the boys who went off to the war that summer, the summer of nineteen forty-two, the summer I lived in New York. It was the war, Mr. Antonelli—the war. Young men… going off to fight and die in a war. A look, a glance, a touch… an hour, a night… and no regrets. There were half a dozen young men who could have been Anna’s father, young men with whom I slept during the time she had to have been conceived. By the time I realized I was pregnant, there had been other young men. I didn’t even try to guess who it might have been, or even what he must have looked like. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I wanted it to be every young man I had been with, every young man to whom I had said good-bye and sent off to war.”
Brave, defiant, indomitable, the fire in her wintry eyes lit up the room.
“Who was Anna’s father? A boy I knew one wonderful summer night in 1942 in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village not far from Washington Square. I think that’s why she turned out so well: born to love and bravery in the middle of a war.”