by Lore Segal
Ilka meant to keep looking intelligently engaged in a conversation these old friends must have been having together for the past decades. Once in a while Leslie threw Ilka a scrap of data, a gloss on a name: “It was Frank who introduced Susanna and Winterneet in sixty-three, wasn’t it? Susanna was Dave Foster’s half sister,” Leslie explained.
“Aha!” Ilka kept saying.
The phone rang. Leslie walked out into the hall.
“Sixty-four is when we had the baby …” said Eliza—Ilka observed Joe Bernstine plant his hands on the arms of his chair, ready to rise, saw Jenny’s forehead corrugate—“and you removed yourself to Berkeley. In sixty-five,” Eliza said to Winterneet, “your three boxes moved to Amherst with us.” Joe settled back; Jenny’s face continued anxious.
Winterneet said, “When I get back from London, I’ll come over and spend the day, and sort out what I want to throw away.”
Leslie returned, “It’s Una. She’s at Kennedy.”
Eliza said, “Tell her no.”
Leslie said, “She just got in from London.”
Eliza said, “No.”
Leslie went out.
Winnie asked, “And how is our little Una?”
“I was happy, until a minute ago, to have heard nothing about little Una for the last six months,” said Eliza.
“She wrote me,” said Leslie returning into the room.
“Well, I was happy to hear nothing about it,” said Eliza.
“Well, I thought you would be happy,” said Leslie.
“Little Una in the granny dress with straw in her hair!” said Winterneet.
“That,” said Eliza, “is our Una.”
The Bernstines offered to give Ilka a lift home. Winterneet said he’d stay if someone would offer him a nightcap.
In the car Ilka asked the Bernstines about Una.
“Poor Una! Fell rather in love with Leslie and Eliza. Leslie-and-Eliza.”
“I can understand that,” said Ilka.
“The Shakespeares brought her back to the States with them. Her father is the theologian, Paul Thayer.”
“Uncle” said Joe, and they argued about Una’s relationship to this Paul Thayer until they arrived at Ilka’s gate.
Sunday morning Leslie called and fetched Ilka in the car. Ilka walked into Eliza’s kitchen and there was Winterneet sitting at the table smiling at Ilka.
Ilka was not some young thing; it annoyed her not to be able to keep up her end—like Eliza, who could cut and slice, correct the seasoning, and perform last-minute maneuvers at the stove and keep the conversation flying like some high-wire act. Ilka developed a crick in the neck looking from a joke of Eliza’s to Winterneet, who swung with it into a mutual reminiscence. Eliza, tossing and tasting the salad, elaborated a very tall tale that Winterneet topped with a deliciously nasty quip. Ilka wanted to play with them, up there, in the middle air, but the palpitation of her heart preempted her breathing. Ilka hunkered down waiting for the laughter to run its course before she took the running start to get her own joke airborne with enough breath for the punch line, but Eliza, removing her beautiful French bread from the oven, had started a story that grew naturally out of Winterneet’s point, which Ilka missed, because it took off from what she suspected herself of not having recognized as a quotation. Ilka crouched to wait for the next opening in the hope of having thought of something that would fit whatever might by that time be under discussion.
Leslie, leaning back in his chair, observed his wife and his friend with the air of a man eating the best bread and butter, and listening to the best conversation, in his own house, at his own breakfast. Eliza had glided two coddled eggs onto Leslie’s plate when the doorbell rang. Leslie looked regretful, got reluctantly up, and went to answer the door. He came back. He said, “Dear. It’s Una.”
“Tell her no,” Eliza said.
“She’s come straight from the airport,” said Leslie. “She has her bags.”
Eliza said, “I recommend the Concordance Hotel, corner Euclid and Main, a clean, well-lighted place.”
Leslie went out.
“You can’t do that! Can you do that?” asked Ilka in an excited whisper. “Can you tell someone to go away?”
“Watch me,” said Eliza. “Or watch me tell Leslie to tell her.”
“But I mean—imagine having just arrived from New York …”
“From London,” Eliza corrected her.
“What can you say to her?”
“You say, ‘If you bother me, I’ll set the Concordance police on you.’ ”
Leslie returned. Eliza gave him back the eggs she had kept warm for him and said, “I make Leslie go and do the dirty work.”
“Yes, you do,” said Leslie.
Ilka said, “What were the actual words you said to her?”
“I said, ‘There’s a nice enough family hotel on Main—medium priced.’ I wrote the address on a piece of paper and hugged her good-bye.”
“You hugged Una!” cried Eliza.
“Yes,” said Leslie.
“She’s Paul Thayer’s niece, no?” asked Winterneet.
“Niece by marriage,” Leslie said. The doorbell rang again. Eliza took Leslie’s eggs and covered them with foil.
When Leslie came back he had his jacket on and the car-keys in his fist. “Her driver has driven off. I’ll take her to the hotel.”
“She’s driven her driver off!” said Eliza. “Our little Una likes Leslie to drive her. Una is always having to be driven. Una always needs picking up.”
Ilka said, “You must have once liked her?”
“Una is a chilly English schoolgirl who came to America and caught the Sixties.”
“Why isn’t that a good thing for a chilly English girl to catch?”
“Because she had to work so hard at it. Have you ever seen a hedonist with gritted teeth?”
“Poor Una,” said Ilka.
“Poor, poor Una,” said Eliza. “Like the baby kangaroo in Pooh Corner who keeps jumping out of its mother’s pouch, saying ‘Look at me jumping!’ Una jumped into everybody’s bed saying, ‘Look at me screwing!’ ”
“But you have to imagine having been born chilly. What was Una supposed to do?” Ilka looked to Winterneet for acquiescence. Winterneet was eating Leslie’s coddled eggs. Ilka said, “Don’t you think there’s something gallant about warming yourself up by your own bootstraps? What do you want her to do?”
“Go back to London,” said Eliza.
When Leslie returned from driving Una to the Concordance Hotel, he drove Ilka home to the Rasmussens’.
Eliza was not present at the institute reception which poor Una gate-crashed.
Ensconced together in the embrasure of the window, Leslie and Una looked like the classic couple one pretends not to notice on a couch, or a park bench—she in tears, he consoling, implicated and sorry, but one knows the trouble is all her own. You imagine one story and another story and all the stories you imagine will hit the nail beside the head. Leslie offered Una his handkerchief and watched her blow her nose. Seeing Ilka looking in their direction, he beckoned. He introduced them.
Una stared at the new entity before her with humorless eyes. She was a lovely, clever-looking young woman. Her no-bra, bedroom-hair style seemed grafted onto a Reynolds beauty. Una’s little, elegant face was exaggeratedly shapely and pointed, her mouth tiny, moist. Instead of an amplitude of crackling satin, Una wore an anorexic pair of jeans. She sobbed. She said, “Isn’t the criminal supposed to be told her crime? What did I do that was so wrong? Why has Eliza dropped me? I rang her on the telephone, and she picked up and said that she was out.”
Ilka and Leslie did not smile. Una had begun to cry again. Leslie offered to drive her back to the hotel. “You want a ride?” he asked Ilka, who understood that she was wanted as a buffer.
Ilka, in the backseat, was no help in stemming Una’s grief at her expulsion from Eliza’s kitchen. “All I want is to sit down face-to-face and talk this thing out!”
“Talking out face-to-face is an overrated activity,” said Leslie sadly. At the hotel he got out and walked the weeping young woman to the door, hugged her good-bye, and patted his pocket, but Una had pocketed his handkerchief.
Leslie got back into the car and said, “Come to the house?”
“Love to.”
Here was Winterneet, sitting at the kitchen table. Eliza was on a tear. “I can’t pick up the telephone without finding Una crying on the other end. Leslie, remember the day Una wove a circle around you thrice?”
“Around us both, you and me,” said Leslie.
“Doesn’t a Jewish bride walk circles around her groom?” Eliza asked Ilka.
“Does she? I’m not a very efficient Jew.”
“She’s a spider spinning you into her web,” said Eliza.
“The magic circle,” said Leslie.
“A mandala,” said Winterneet. “Una was incorporating you. Our Una was into a little bit of witchcraft?”
“ ‘Into’ witchcraft, as you are ‘into’ destroying the language,” said Eliza, but Winterneet said he was rather fond of this “being into” things and grinned into Ilka’s eyes. It was a nice example of what Mencken called “judicious neology,” he said, but offered to give it up if Eliza could come up with another English formulation that expressed that particular human relation to a human activity.
“It’s a syntactic barbarism,” said Eliza. They were off. Leslie leaned back and smiled at them. Ilka was jealous.
Ilka did not think that she had impressed herself on Una’s consciousness so she was surprised, when she answered the Rasmussens’ front-door bell, to find the girl on her doorstep. “Leslie gave me your address,” said Una. Una had come to talk about the Shakespeares. “It’s like living a who-done-it that starts with the hanging, and it’s me being hanged. I mean, what did I do? I think it was the ice cream,” said Una. “Eliza once made ice cream and it tasted lovely, and I told her it tasted lovely, but I shouldn’t have said I liked the consistency of the bought kind, because she didn’t talk to me the rest of the meal.”
“We are so weird,” said Ilka, “the way we can none of us bear being faulted.”
“But I wasn’t even faulting her. I didn’t say I didn’t like her ice cream; all I said was I liked the consistency of the bought kind.”
“Say I’m wearing a blue dress,” said Ilka, “and you say, ‘Green is a nice color,’ and I think, ‘I’m never going to talk to Una ever again.’ ”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“That’s what I mean,” said Ilka. “We are, all of us, ridiculous. All we can hear is somebody saying we are less than perfect. And it’s not as if we hadn’t already got that figured out for ourselves.”
“I never mind being told when I’m wrong.”
Ilka said, “Will you forgive me if I don’t believe you?”
“What I can’t stand,” said Una, “is not being told what I’m supposed to have done! I don’t understand people not sitting down face-to-face.” Una wiped her eyes and said, “What I actually think is, I think my opinions are too difficult for Eliza to assimilate. She’s Canadian, you know, very uptight. I threaten her because I hang loose.” Ilka looked surreptitiously at her watch, but Una was just getting started.
Leslie beeped his horn outside Ilka’s gate Sunday. “Eliza is on a rampage.” A new phase had begun in what Eliza called the Una Wars. Leslie had gone to bed early as usual. Eliza, staying downstairs with her book, had raised her eyes and seen Una looking in the window.
The version Eliza told Ilka and Winterneet at the kitchen table was more elaborate. “I walk into the kitchen to get myself a glass of wine, walk back into the living room, settle myself on the sofa. Where’s my book? Nothing like being in the middle of a book, and you don’t know where you put it down. I get up, I walk around, I’m looking all around and there’s this maenad—a bacchante—wild-eyed, hair full of fruit and leaves, looking in the window mouthing at me! I let out such a holler Leslie comes bounding downstairs—and it is something to see Leslie bounding in his striped blue pajamas.”
Leslie said, “Eliza was going to call the police and report a trespasser.”
“It was our Una peering through the cherry tomatoes! Leslie pulled on his trousers and drove her back to her hotel.”
“My bell at the Rasmussens rang,” said Ilka, “and it was Una come to complain about you.”
“Can’t open a door, or look through a window without finding Una on the other side.”
The doorbell rang and Eliza said, “I’m calling the police.” It was the town deli with a delivery: Una’s peace offering, a heroic basket—a cornucopia. “Bourbon-spiked marmalade! That’s disgusting,” said Eliza.
“Let’s try some,” said Leslie.
“Canned jugged hare! Toss it out. Look at the size of the pears! They’re obscene,” said Eliza.
“The superfruit, in—what kind of still-life paintings am I thinking of ?” said Leslie.
“The kind that has a worm crawling out of the apple, or a bug, a wasp. A spider.”
Ilka said, “Eliza, you have to imagine being Una and not knowing what to do about you. I think she really is in pain.”
“She’s a pain in the neck,” said Eliza.
“Really, though,” Ilka said to Leslie when he drove her home, “what did Una do that made Eliza drop her?”
“Eliza and I,” said Leslie, “dropped Una.”
Ilka accepted the reprimand. In a moment she said, “Imagine you have friends you love, whose kitchen you are used to walking in and out of, and one day they will not let you in and won’t tell you why.”
Leslie was silent for such a long time that Ilka said, “Why won’t you tell Una why?”
“I’m trying to think of the answer to your question,” said Leslie. “I don’t want to answer you until I have thought.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll get you a copy of Winterneet’s little book called Tales from the Mouth of God. They’re quite nice. In each of Winnie’s tales, God rather irritably corrects a Bible story that misrepresents what he had in mind. God says, ‘Why would I have expelled Adam and Eve for eating a fruit?’ The trouble was they bored him, but he didn’t want to tell them. It’s devastating to know you are a bore, because it’s not something you can do anything about. Kinder to let them think it was something they had done wrong, so they could live in the hope of stopping doing it and getting back into paradise. So God said, ‘Let there be sin.’ ”
“Do you think Una is a bore?”
“Don’t you think?”
Ilka said, “But wasn’t she the same bore when you liked her and brought her to the States with you?”
“In another of Winnie’s stories, God explains why he created falling in love, which makes the other person’s sin smell like your own sin—that’s to say, not at all. Ah, but the stink after we fall out of love, out of friendship!”
“That is so terrible!”
“Yes, it is,” said Leslie.
Back in the kitchen Eliza was filling Winterneet’s glass. She filled her own glass and said, “The phone rings. Una is strapped for money and the bank is about to close. Leslie runs over to drive her to the bank. The phone rings. Una is suicidal. Leslie runs over to catch her jumping out the window. ‘You have to imagine being poor Una being strapped!’ ” said Eliza in a mincing voice, with an innocent gape of the eyes, and a Viennese roll of the “r”, “‘You have to imagine being suicidal!’ I don’t have to bloody imagine being suicidal! And I don’t have to ‘imagine’ Una when I’ve got her bloody underfoot.”
Winterneet tilted the empty salad bowl and picked out the pieces of arugala sticking to the sides.
Eliza was still going strong the following evening, at a dinner party at the Ayes. A letter had been slipped under Eliza’s kitchen door. “I swear I will call the State Department and get her extradited if she persists in creeping round my house in the night.” Eliza read the letter in its entirety, and in a voice of emp
hatic drama: “ ‘Expulsion and excommunication are cruel and unusual punishments for the commission of a crime of which one has not been accused. I feel that I am living a Kafkaesque who-done-it that opens with my hanging as the criminal who has to double as the detective trying to discover my crime.’ Here,” said Eliza, “we come to our central mystery. Una writes, ‘Was it the ice cream?’ Una appears to suspect herself of having committed an ice cream. ‘Give me five minutes’—three exclamation marks—‘and I will tell you what I meant about consistency’—one more exclamation mark and a tearstain. ‘Why will you not give me the opportunity to explain or maybe just plain apologize?’ Tearstains. ‘Of all the people I have ever met in all of my life …’ ” Eliza’s voice suggested accompanying violins, “ ‘I have never been so happy as in your and Leslie’s company… .’ ” Eliza placed her right hand as if to hold up her left breast in the manner of certain neoclassic fountain statuary, and raised her eyes to the heavens above before lowering them onto page two: “ ‘I have sat at your kitchen table and I have thought, There is no place in all the world where I would rather be than right here, right now.’ ”
Ilka was watching Winterneet walking toward her. Winterneet leaned against the wall beside Ilka, who said to him, “That’s just how I feel about the Shakespeares’ kitchen table.”
“Me too, until Eliza goes on a tear.”
Ilka experienced the small thrill of a small treachery. She said, “I am getting a bit weary of Eliza and the Una Wars.”
“I,” said Winterneet, “am getting out of town.”
“How long do Eliza’s tears usually last?”
“Until she finds the next old favorite to demolish. I’m going to London for the weekend,” said Winterneet.
“No you’re not, and I can prove it.” Winterneet turned his face to look at Ilka, who said, “People I stand leaning against a wall at a party next to, don’t go to London for weekends.”