by Renata Adler
“I yield to myself,” the congressman said, at the start of the speech with which he was about to enter history, “as much time as I will consume.”
He was on the phone. I will ask her to dinner, he thought. I will accept her invitation to a party. I will laugh at whatever seems to constitute a joke in her mind, if she will only permit me, with the pact of affection still securely in our voices, to hang up. She continued to talk through her end of the phone, though. When he sounded unamused, her voice seemed to reproach him. When he tried an animated tone, she seemed encouraged to continue. She kept patting every sentence along the line with a little crazy laugh.
I don’t know how many people have ever seen or passed through Broadway Junction. It seems to me one of the world’s true wonders: nine crisscrossing, overlapping elevated tracks, high in the air, with subway cars screeching, despite uncanny slowness, over thick rusted girders, to distant, sordid places. It might have been created by an architect with an Erector Set and recurrent amnesia, and city ordinances and graft, this senseless ruined monster of all subways, in the air. Not far away, there is that Brownsville section of crushed, hollowed houses, an immense metropolis in ruins, with an occasional junkie, corpse, demented soul intent upon an errand where no errand can exist. There can’t even be rats, unless they’re feeding on each other. Then, just on the edge of this deserted strangeness, there begins a little neighborhood of sorts, with tenants, funeral homes, groceries, one or two policemen. Once, along the border street, I saw an endless line of Cadillacs, with men in suits and hats, with chauffeurs and manicures and somber faces. An owner of a liquor store had passed on to the funeral home. The Italians who run that community were paying their respects. The actual street neighbors seemed divided between obligations to the dear departed and protocols toward the men in Cadillacs. Nothing for the foundation here. Nothing for the paper, either. No events.
“Any dreams?” the doctor asked his patient softly, tentatively, as we used to say in the child’s card game, “Any aces? Any tens?”
In actual fact, the lady on the Boeing 707 from Zurich was talking to me about seaweed. I had just come from St. Moritz and she from Gstaad. Nearly all the other passengers were in casts from skiing. Her husband had invented a calorie-free spaghetti made from seaweed. He had invented other seaweed products, including a seaweed sauce for the spaghetti. He was the world’s yet unacknowledged living authority on seaweed and its many uses. She was quite eloquent about it. I was interested for nearly seven hours. My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions. Everybody’s capacity for having a good time. It must have been fun before the casts, and there will always be another season. The man who hurls himself in order to be the last person through the closing doors of an already overcrowded subway pushes, after all, some timid souls in front of him. Maybe the stresses of winding toward the millennium.
“Well, you know. His wife was chased by an elephant.”
“No.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Yes. It was too awful. They were watching the elephants, when she simply fell down. The elephant ran over and knelt on her. She was in the hospital for months.”
“No.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Quite different from anything she ever got from Roger, I expect.”
Day after day, when I still worked at the Forty-second Street branch of the public library, I saw the same young man, bearded, intense, cleaning his fingernails on the corners of the pages of a book. “What are you studying for?” I asked him once. The numbers were flashing over the counter as the books came up. “Research,” he said. “I’m writing my autobiography.” There are certainly odd people in that reading room—one who doodles the same bird endlessly on the back of a half of a single bank check, one who hums all the time, and one who keeps asking the other two to stop. A little pantomime concerto. I quit that job soon. The trouble is, I sometimes understand that research project. Or I did understand it. Then.
“What a riot!” a girl of about twenty-five, not thin, exclaimed as the de Havilland Otter started down the runway of the Fishers Island airport. “Is this a toy or an airplane?” a young man with a sparse mustache asked nervously. “I paid for my ticket twice. They pulled the Fishers Island–New York section by mistake, in Groton. Now there’s this.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I was in a plane like this when I was studying crisis conditions in Southeast Asia. They have outhouses behind their huts, over the rivers. Then they eat the river carp. Ecology. Everyone trusted these planes. The worry was just bombs and mortars. They seemed most concerned about the local cockfights. Gamecocks. I had never seen one till I went there. Ben Tre. It no longer exists. For flights I have these pills.”
“The Wright Brothers’ special,” the Fishers Island girl continued. A clattering began under the floor of the plane’s midsection. All ten passengers started their own tones of laughter. The clattering was overlaid with creaking. “Can you believe it?” the girl said. “It’s fantastic.”
“The most fun is when you hit the clouds and have to pedal,” a sailor said. He was stationed in Groton. The plane incessantly jarred, bounced, and tilted. I counted and found I had enough painkilling pills for everyone. “I always pack too much whenever I travel,” a lady said quite loudly as the windows fogged. “We’re moving from New York. My son has been mugged six times. He’s just eleven. We can’t keep buying him new watches.” She went on like that. The two-ticket man held on to my wrist so tightly that my own watch left marks for hours after, on the white ring watches leave inside a tan. We landed at LaGuardia. The young man let go.
Another weekend. Any dreams. P.O. Box 1492.
The school was run by Communists, although few parents were aware of that. The grades ran from one to twelve. The younger children slept throughout the year on a screened-in open porch that was thought, in wintertime, to confer immunities. There were sixteen double-decker beds on the porch, and one single bed, near the door, for the child who was held to be the most disturbed in any given year. Late at night, the oldest told horror stories. Later still, the most disturbed child would bang her head against the bedpost in her sleep, or cry, or speak in no known language, whatever the disturbance that year was. Before dawn, the rest leaped wildly from top bunk to top bunk, sometimes single file, sometimes racing, sometimes three leapers side by side at a single time. Once or twice in those years, somebody crashed and broke a leg.
We voted constantly on everything—issues and offices of every kind. We were expected at every age to have an opinion on all matters, political matters in particular. Although pressure from the teachers that year was clearly for Wallace (Henry, not George), the teachers restrained themselves—nominally because they valued our independent judgment, actually because they lived in dread of our petitions. We fired a housemother by petition. We voted in fifth-grade physics that half a pound of feathers weighed more than half a pound of steel. We were adamant. Knowledge itself was a democracy. We studied fanatically. We were as competitive as only a child state can be. We voted to stone the girl who banged her head—not because she banged her head, but because she was so fat and furtive and whining all the time. She lost a loafer running across the athletic field. None of the stones hit. We were too uncoordinated and too young to throw accurately across the distance we had also, in all fairness, voted for. The space-time continuum became clear to us with that event. So, perhaps, did the quality of mercy, after all. We did not vote to fire the shop teacher, although we wanted to. We planed and sawed and used the lathe and soldered, making Christmas presents for our families. Christmas in all wildly progressive schools was celebrated with obsessional gravity. In one year’s holy pageant, a girl’s hair caught fire, from a candle held reverently by the boy behind. A father leaped to the balcony and put the fire out. Parents were allowed to visit every other Sunday, and for pageants and plays.
Excellent evidence. “The source said that the investigators con
sidered the responses of the dogs ‘excellent evidence,’” the Times reported. “In each case the two dogs reacted positively to Mr. Hoffa’s scent. One by standing up,” the story went on, “and the other by sitting down.” Since Will is a lawyer and I used to be an investigative reporter, we conclude that the dogs went to different schools, one to a sitting school, one to a standing school, but anyway to different schools.
There were, of course, in all such places, compulsory classes in ballet. Boys and girls, in leotards, lying around the resined floor in ballet class, were all instructed to listen, eyes shut, to Chopin or the Firebird or something, and let the mind run freely over whatever the music might suggest, all enjoined particularly to relax. The music played. Pensive children mused. Ambitious children worried. Homesick children grieved. Everyone lay still. Suddenly, the ballet teacher would swoop down and pick up somebody’s hand or foot. Newcomers were often startled into a small scream. After the first few times, they regained control. Determined then to show just how relaxed they were, they would obligingly help to raise the swooped-at hand or foot, try even to anticipate the swoop. “Why, you’re not relaxed,” the teacher—quite commonly a psychology major, born in Riverdale and recently divorced from an Algerian or Pakistani—would say, in astonishment and reproach. “Look at it. Why, just look at this foot.” She would hold the foot a moment, and then let it go. For normally nervous children, there were two possibilities: being left with a raised foot; or being just alert enough to let it drop, not limply, however, as it was meant to fall, but like a stone. In either case, in the name, it seemed, of dance, the teacher would deal in earnest with that hand or foot; and if you did not have a nervous breakdown then, you had presumably acquired—as from that wintry open porch; as, for that matter, from being sent away to boarding school at the age of six or eight—another immunity. It was always, of course, rumored that somebody in these classes, out of pure calm, fell asleep. But like that other, more flamboyant and dangerous story, which was told in public schools—that some child had lain down between the railroad tracks in town, and had remained there, relaxed and unharmed, while all the cars of a train passed over him—it was a fable. It was false.
“I’m sorry. Mr. Ellis has stepped out. He’s on another line. He’s in a meeting. Mrs. Harwell? Oh, just a minute. She’s away from her desk.”
There is a particular fanaticism about riding in progressive summer camps and prep schools. The camps may sound either drawn from Hiawatha, or like a condition that will require surgery—my brothers went to Melatoma, I to Sighing Rock. The schools will be named for an improbable condition of the landscape (Peat Cliff, Glen Willow Sands, Mount Cove, Apple Valley Heights), or for something dour and English: Gladstone Wett. The riding teachers are named Miss Cartwright, Miss Farew, Martha Abbott Struth. Ms. Struth, if she is married, will have her own academy, which teaches every horse thing from gymkhana to dressage. Mr. Struth has been away or dead for twenty years. Field hockey coaches, whistles hanging from their necks, brown and white oxfords on their feet, may stride, with their emphatic, shoulder-inflected hockey walk; they can shout, exhort, scold, shrilly whistle, keep a red and frosty silence, like their counterparts on football fields. All field coaches carry on—as though those fractures, scars, grunts, knockouts, limps, and broken noses were well worth it. Field hockey for girls, football for boys, seeming to them, perhaps, such useful skills to have in adult life. These coaches, male and female, have always had disciples. In fact, I know of no one who was a boarding student at a wildly progressive school, in those years, who did not incur a slight, though permanently laming or disfiguring injury on its fields. But it was horses that held the imagination; it has always been the riding teachers who preside.
At that school, sex and mysticism set in, simultaneously. We used to walk through the dark, from our porch, to the stables, where we imagined that a horse had died, untended and alone. We had not been told. Couples, late at night, holding hands, looking for the corpse of Gladys—who had, in fact, been sold, the school having fallen on hard times. We slept in the hay above the stalls. We returned to our porches before dawn. The school has since gone entirely to seed—heroin, LSD, precocious abortions, methedrine. In our time, we planned but did not even dare to run away. We had codes, ceremonies, aliases. We had oaths. We had marathon walks and rides. Once, on the morning of the middle children’s all-day ride, with the night to be spent in sleeping bags, a matter of great ritual importance to us then, a small girl from a theatrical family said to us, in parting, “Break a leg.” We had a unison of panic. Superstition had become intense.
Myra Miller broke a leg. It was my fault. I had a dread by then of our most skittish, lightest horse. It always seemed, in his nervousness and mine, that I was gliding on unsteady air. I was assigned that horse. The first time he shied—at a flower, I think—I fell off, deliberately. Myra, who had been given the phlegmatic nag I longed for, took advantage of the flash of fear to spur that nag, for the first time in its ten horse years, no doubt, to gallop through the woods, with frightened eyes. Myra gave a rebel yell, and used a switch. The nag galloped too close by a tree, which, like Absalom’s, singled Myra out—not by the hair but by the leg. Her leg was broken by the time she fell. I was left with her while the rest of the expedition went for help. “Anything I can do?” I kept saying. Myra would say, “Oh, Christ.” I have since heard this precise exchange many times, out here.
Then Myra’s mother came. Not a play, or pageant, or Sunday—Myra’s accident. The mother and I talked. There was a bath schedule outside the porch bathroom—each child having been allotted an uncapitalist three baths a week. “I have to go to the loo,” Myra’s mother said. She tried to commit suicide in there. Not very seriously. With nail scissors. “It’s my fault,” she kept saying, when the ambulance came. “Myra’s all my fault.” That was probably true. The fault for the leg was mine. I rode, on the school’s insistence, the same skittish horse all term after that. I reined him back till his mouth was wrecked for the snaffle, and the curb was all that would hold him back. The riding teacher used to throw stones at him to make him go. When he went, I would fall off at once.
Ten years ago, I was in Mississippi, covering blacks, whites, troopers, Klansmen, nuns, whoever there was. The F.B.I. had already infiltrated the Klan to the extent that, by whatever means, they had demoralized and almost destroyed it. A small-town klavern, run by a gas-station attendant, did discover an agent in their midst. They drove him to a dark, deserted road. He conceded that they’d caught him. His predicament was trouble. He also promised that, if they did him any harm whatever, some other agents at the Bureau would come down and blow the Klansmen’s heads off. They did nothing to him. That klavern dispersed. Later, when there still seemed to be an obdurate nest of Klansmen left in Mississippi and Louisiana, it was rumored that some F.B.I. men, having tried all sorts of warnings and persuasions, drove a few of the unrelenting to another rural road and blew their heads off. It may not be true. Agents from that time and place will just grin when they are asked.
She was a dynamite girl and he was an aces fellow. On the day he at last agreed by phone to marry her, the switchboard operators were overjoyed. For six months they had listened, in sympathy and indignation, to the tears, the threats, the partings and reconciliations. They were so unequivocally for the girl that only the purest professionalism kept them, at times, from breaking in. On the day Tim, after calls to his best friend, his first wife, and his therapist, gave in at last, the oldest operator, who had been on the switchboard for twenty years, actually wept. The other two told the receptionist, at lunch. All four ladies had a drink, and then bought a card of slightly obscene felicitations. They had wavered toward the sentimental, but rejected it as basically unswinging. They did not sign the card. Tim and his girl, who had been breaking up once again on the day they received it (she was packing; they were in his apartment), were appalled. As a result of the card, and discussions of what to do about it—what it implied, who knew and who didn’t�
��they married.
A physicist I first met when he was working on a government military project recently turned to drastic civil disobedience. When I went to visit him and his wife in their Village apartment, the phone rang constantly—two rings for one sort of friend, ten for another. “If it took an act that I might go to jail for to bring my friends together for an evening,” the physicist said, “then it wasn’t pointless, was it?” The apartment was filled with friends from other days, other lives, looking tired and talking. The doorbell kept on ringing. A young priest would go downstairs and check. “Who was that?” the physicist said when the priest came back alone. “A man from the Daily News,” the priest said. “I told him you weren’t here.” A reader of the News objected. “They had a petition protesting their own coverage of this kind of story. Maybe he signed it.” The physicist was out the door and halfway down the block in a minute. He came back. “I found the guy,” he said. “I asked him whether he signed. He said no, he felt he could do more by not signing, by positive action in covering just this kind of story. I thanked him. I asked him to convey my thanks to the people who did sign. The guy said, I’m sure they would appreciate it more if you wrote them a personal note. I said, Oh, no, I feel I can do more by positive action in just this kind of conversation.”
When I first came to New York, a man I somehow knew, a film producer, took me from my job at the school where I was then working to dinner at the Colony. Before dinner, I was to meet him at his St. Regis suite. I arrived ten minutes late and knew at once it was an error. I should have waited twenty minutes. I had just started smoking weeks before. Over drinks in the suite, he lighted my cigarette. The match fell on the rug. I picked it up. Another error. He was a nice man. After dinner, he walked me up all six flights of the place where I was living. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen a girl’s apartment,” he said. After a while, there was one of those awkward, off-romantic moments. “It’s not my age, is it?” he said, earnestly. He was seventy-four. “No, no,” I said, “I guess I’m just neurotic.” That seemed all right. We became friends. At one point, he thought I might be the girl for his son, another film producer. It was awkward for the son and me, at Trader Vic’s, trying to be a generation. The son said he had three files of projects: one marked A through Z; one A prime through Z prime; and one marked Miscellaneous. He said that only since his analysis had he come to realize how much he had to offer.