by Lore Segal
Winterneet said, “Come with me.”
Ilka laughed and said, “That’ll be the day!” and caught the sound—or caught the small, violent commotion, by her right ear—of Winterneet’s face responding as if to one of those empty movie slaps. Ilka, unaware of having administered it, turned in surprise to see only the left ear, and slack left jaw, of Winterneet’s face turning in a direction radically away from her. “A week in Copenhagen; a weekend in London!” said Ilka, who thought she was flattering the famous old man. “Sounds too damn glamorous.”
“Does it?” Winterneet turned his face to look not at Ilka but straight before him. “It’s a gas from the time I get out of bed in the morning until sometime around five in the afternoon. Then I want to die.”
“Don’t they give you receptions every night?”
“Every night,” said Winterneet.
“Don’t you get to meet everybody? You can have any damn body you want!”
“Evidently not,” said Winterneet glumly.
Sunday Leslie beeped outside Ilka’s gate. Eliza was fit to be tied. “Winterneet has taken Una to London with him.”
“Really! He really took her? I didn’t think he was serious!” Ilka would have liked Leslie to ask her what she was talking about. Ilka would have liked Leslie to know that Winterneet had invited her to come to London. She said, “Have you ever retrospectively understood what you didn’t see while it was happening in front of your nose?”
But Leslie was turning into his drive and pulled up sharply. “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” In the middle of the driveway stood three cardboard boxes. Leslie said, “You go in and talk to Eliza.” He got out, picked up the first of the boxes, and carried it into the house and up the stairs to his study.
Eliza said, “I’m fit to be tied.”
“I think,” Ilka said, “that traveling solo is Winterneet’s memento mori. No one can bear being alone except most people keep right on bearing it. Winterneet can’t, and he doesn’t have to.”
“Must be why every time he left the latest wife he moved in with us, bringing another box full of papers.” She smiled blackly at Leslie who walked in rather out of breath. “We moved two boxes of his to Amherst with us, stored three with our things when we went back to Oxford, and now brought them to Concordance. For fifteen years Winnie has been going to take his boxes home as soon as he sorts through what he is going to throw away.”
“Which he will never do, because” said Ilka, “the papers we are always going to throw away are the papers we are never going to read again, and we won’t know which they are till we’ve read them again.”
“That’s so,” said Leslie and looked at Ilka with the pleasure with which he looked at his wife when she said something that was true or funny.
Eliza said, “And Winnie might embarrass himself by coming across the Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote when he was twenty-three.” Eliza’s voice scratched like a saw moving up and down her throat.
Leslie uncrossed his right leg from over his left knee and crossed his left over his right leg. He said, “Dear.”
“You know what Winnie did on the day we lost the baby?” Leslie rose and went to stand behind her. “He got out of town! The Bernstines to all intents and purposes moved in with us,” Eliza said. “The Bernstines sat with us and howled with us and talked with us and were silent with us, and Winnie got out of town.”
Ilka said, “Some of us don’t know what to do around our friends when something terrible happens to them.”
Eliza said, “I haven’t called my friend Sarah, who wrote to tell me her son has leukemia.”
“I wrote her,” said Leslie.
“The hell you did,” said Eliza swiveling her chair to give Leslie a pretend kick in the shins. Maybe it was not pretend.
Ilka said, “You can’t mention what has happened in case you draw blood and you can’t not mention it.”
“Well Winnie,” said Eliza, “doesn’t like blood, so he got out of town and let it flow behind him.”
“Dear,” Leslie said, “that will do.”
Ilka had supper with the Shakespeares Wednesday and the Bernstines dropped by. Jenny looked worriedly at Eliza and said, “Winnie’s back. He’s installed Una in his house.”
Joe, looking sheepish, said, “We’ve offered Una an internship.”
Several subjects were started and dropped into the abyss of Eliza’s silence, so it seemed out of left field that she presently said, “Will no one take my part? Nobody is on my side? Leslie chauffeurs Una around town. Joe gives her a job. Ilka imagines her point of view; Ilka imagines Winnie’s point of view. Ilka imagines everybody’s point of view except mine.”
Ilka said, “I’m doing sympathetic magic: I think what I think is that if I argue Una’s and Winnie’s points of view, someone, when you have had enough and dropped me, will argue my point of view.” Ilka, who had thought that she was joking, discovered that she was going to cry.
“We are your elective cousins,” said Leslie
“What do you plan to do for which you will deserve to be dropped?” asked Eliza.
“That,” said Ilka, “is what I want you to promise that you will tell me.”
Eliza said, “Make you a deal: If you’ll quit imagining everything and everybody and making me look like the wicked witch of Concordance, I promise to badmouth you to your face.”
“And Leslie, do you promise?”
The best that Leslie’s conscience would suffer him to do was to offer to open another bottle of this quite nice white wine.
Crime
GARBAGE THIEF
This was back in the days when Ilka Weisz was new at the Concordance Institute. She had been at the Shakespeares’ with colleagues and once for an institute dinner, but it excited her to enter their kitchen with them, by way of the garage. She tried to keep out of the way while they passed each other to reach the icebox and fix the drinks. They walked into the living room where Eliza said, “Leslie! The garbage thief!” and went to the window and banged on it. “Leslie!”
Leslie had sat down on the couch. Ilka wanted to go and sit beside him but she went and stood beside Eliza who was pummeling the glass. “What our Mrs. Coots calls ‘the element,’” Eliza said. The garbage thief was a black man dressed in layers of black and dust, tall and thin, a pin head with a pronounced Adam’s apple and no chin. Ilka had expected an old bum but the garbage thief was a young man. His long length curved into an “S” over the Shakespeares’ garbage with soft knees, whipping on the balls of his feet in rather the way Eliza, in her kitchen, bent over her cutting and chopping. The man leaned suddenly all the way into the can.
“He ’s thorough,” Ilka said.
The young man stirred with a two-armed motion bringing the things at the bottom of the garbage can to the surface. Large or opaque objects which might hide treasure below he threw over the sides.
“On my sidewalk!” said Eliza.
It’s not your sidewalk, is what Ilka wanted to, but did not, say.
“Call the police.”
Ilka did not say, He’s not doing anything illegal! This was in the early, wooing days of the friendship between Ilka and the Shakespeares, and Eliza was older than Ilka by some fifteen years and the Director’s Wife.
“You threw out your pigskin driving gloves?” Eliza said to Leslie.
“The left glove. I lost the right one.”
“What if you find it?”
“That’s what you said last year. Eliza, come and sit down.”
“Sanitation is never going to pick up the mess!”
“I will pick up when he’s gone.”
“And I will help you,” Ilka said.
The Shakespeares’ street was lined with venerable, large, and healthy trees. The sidewalk buckled with the upthrust of their giant roots.
“Why don’t you not come out?” Leslie said to Eliza and took the broom out of her hands. “Messes make Eliza unhappy,” he explained to Ilka.
“Sunday’s Book Review, Wednesday’s
pasta primavera,” said Eliza.
“An argument against relativity,” Leslie said. “What is healthy smells like itself; messes smell of corruption.”
Ilka said, “When I was fifteen I bit into a moldy apple turnover. The probability of ever again meeting a moldy turnover is minimal, yet I’ve never bitten into another. And I love apple turnovers.”
“Don’t you loooove insights?” Eliza said. “There’s Mother’s brown teapot. Una broke the lid. Mother got it from our junk man. Our junk man worked our street first Monday of the month. Little brown horse, drum lamp shades stacked one inside the other, leprous fur coats, tennis racquets with no strings. Mother pointed and the junk man pulled out a brass candlestick. Mother said, ‘What am I going to do with a single candlestick, unless you want to throw in—what are those legs sticking out—no, further back, on the left—right there. I could use a side chair.’ Good little Bentwood. Mother had an eye. The garbage thief rejects my slippers.”
“Why don’t you go on inside?” Eliza had retired the three steps up the porch and stood holding her skirt in the classic stance of the female in the presence of small rodents. The squirrel sat up on its hind quarters moving its teeth with the rapidity of machinery.
“It’s eating the crust from Sunday’s deep-dish apple pie,” said Eliza.
“Go away, shoo!” Leslie said to the squirrel. “You are meant to be frightened of me. You are meant to run away!” The animal registered the presence of the man with the broom by ceasing to nibble and sitting motionless.
Ilka said, “Human beings can’t hold still like that!” The humans held still enough for the animal to come out of its freeze. It advanced on rapid feet as if wheels propelled it, froze, advanced and froze inches from Leslie’s shoe. He had to stand with his feet together for fear of treading on the little beast. “Go away. Shoo.” When he shook the broom the squirrel’s fur waved like grass in the backdraft of a taxiing airplane. The three humans shared a sense of something mildly sinister. “It’s mortally afraid of me but won’t go away. I’ll call campus security about the garbage thief.”
This was before Ilka had a car of her own and Leslie offered to drive her home. “Come with us,” he begged Eliza.
“No thank you. Drive around the project,” she said to him.
Leslie had driven Ilka through the project, saying “The project makes Eliza unhappy.” Ilka refrained from saying, Eliza’s unhappiness is not the problem here, though contradiction was her instinct, her autobiography, her politics. Mention a fact and Ilka’s mind kicked into action to round up the facts that disproved it. Express an opinion and Ilka’s blood was up to voice an opposite idea. The day was not far when Ilka would begin to argue with Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare.
The project was an old, low-rise complex covering four square blocks and separated from Concordance University by the South Meadow. “In its day, it was a model of its kind,” said Leslie.
“Why is the grass all chewed up? Why do the trees look as if they’re on welfare? Why do they steal their own bricks out of their own walls?”
“Joe wants to fund a project project.”
“They seem to be having a good time.” Ilka meant the men talking in groups, boys and girls sitting on the walls, poking each other; a woman watered a corner garden of hollyhocks and tomatoes.
Leslie said, “Come on Sunday and help me get Eliza to go to the annual Summer Fiesta.”
The fiesta was traditionally held on the Concordance campus. Ilka walked into the noise and commotion with the Shakespeares. “Why am I feeling cheerful?”
“Because it’s summer,” suggested Leslie.
“Seems silly to be happy because the sun’s out.”
“I don’t have that problem,” said Eliza.
“It’s your wine,” Ilka said. “It was the lovely lunch.” She had held the pale golden soup in her mouth to check a taste different from any taste that she had ever known. “Cumin,” said Eliza. Eliza’s salad glistened more deeply green than regular salad. “Spinach,” said Eliza.
Ilka had waited for them at their front door, listening to married people getting themselves out of their front door: keys were found where they were not supposed to have been left; ground-floor windows had not been locked. “The element will be out in force today,” said Eliza. “Drive around the project.”
“All right,” said Leslie. Ilka said nothing.
“Leslie, park behind the institute. We have new hubcaps. God Almighty, what would the first president have said to barbecuing on his front lawn—The grass will never be the same.”
Now Ilka said, “Bad for the grass, nice for the human beings.”
Eliza said, “Puerto Ricans out in their Hawaiian duds.”
Ilka said, “And the provost in his cricket whites, everybody walking together. It’s the Peaceable Kingdom!”
“God Almighty!” Eliza said once more.
“And if he existed,” said Ilka, “he would be in his heaven.”
Here came the provost, a light, upright figure in white slacks and shirt, and his pleasant wife in chiffon with a modified garden hat, to pass the time of day with the new director of the institute and his formidable wife.
“We haven’t had such a thoroughly splendid day for our fiesta since—” the provost mentioned a year within the present decade.
“What about …” said Eliza Shakespeare naming a random year. “That was fair to middling.”
The provost’s countenance held steady.
“As for—” and Eliza named yet another year, “that was a bummer.”
Leslie introduced Ilka. “One of our junior members.”
“Nineteen hundred sixty-nine,” Eliza said, “that was another year.”
“Well,” said the provost. His wife aborted a squeak. The provost had pinched her, meaning “Start walking,” forgetting she bruised easily.
“Let us hope and pray,” Eliza said, “that next year will be—” and she mentioned the year that only doomsday could prevent it from being. “At least,” Eliza said to the provost’s diminishing back, “he keeps his shirt on. Why does the element want to run around naked?”
“Because the sun is out,” Leslie said.
Eliza said, “I’m going to bite the next person who mentions the weather. Hello, Bernstines. Hello, Teddy. Cassandra,” she told the barking animal, “I know just how you feel.”
“It’s she saw a squirrel,” Teddy said. Joe said, “Cassandra feels her responsibilities. There are dogs who smile. Cassandra frowns. Be glad, Cassandra! The sun is out, the sky is blue and everyone is walking together and eating and sitting on blankets. Cassandra, shut up! Did anybody see Bethy? Hello, Nat.”
Nat Cohn was bent over a blanket on which an African student had spread neck chains, brooches, bangles, seeds, beads, small carved animals, chunks of amber.
“Ethnic, after a while, gets to all look the same,” said Eliza. “Where’s Nancy?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Nat said. “We are not talking.”
The Bernstines walked off to look for Bethy. Joe said, “The Shakespeares have a new adoptee.”
“I like Ilka,” Jenny said and frowned anxiously.
Nat Cohn walked beside Ilka who said, “Hide me! There’s Gerti Gruner from Conversational English. She keeps inviting me to supper and I never go, and there goes Sylvia Brandon. I invite her for a cup of coffee and she doesn’t answer. She never remembers who I am.”
Nat and Ilka had dropped a little behind. Nat said, “The Shakespeares have adopted you.” The observation displeased Ilka. “We’re friends.”
“You and Leslie are friends.”
Ilka said, “Leslie, Eliza, and I are friends.”
“Yes, you are,” Nat said. In a moment he added “I bet that at any given moment, in any room, you know Leslie’s whereabouts, and whether he stands or sits, and who he’s talking with, am I right?”
Ilka knew that she should deny the implication but it gratified her. “That’s clever of you.”
“I’m a very clever man,” said Nat, “cleverer than Leslie. I’m the most empathetic man you have ever met. There’s Nancy. I’m going to go so she can tell me how badly I am behaving. Maybe it’s you and I who should be having that cup of coffee?”
Ilka caught up with the Shakespeares. “Nat is extraordinary. He walks into my head and tells me what I didn’t know that I was thinking.”
“Infernal cheek!” Eliza said. “Anybody walks into my head uninvited, I’d turf them out so fast!”
“It’s sort of thrilling!” said Ilka.
“It’s invasive,” said Leslie unpleasantly.
“It’s conversation,” Ilka said.
Leslie said, “Conversation is not a sleight of hand, not a performance in which one shows off one’s penetration at the expense of the other person. Conversation is a willing exchange of just as much as the participants are willing to expose to each other.”
“Well, I think he’s the best talker I have ever known. Why are you angry?”
“I’m not angry,” said Leslie angrily.
Ilka looked to catch Eliza’s eye but Eliza had spotted Bethy Bernstine. She said, “Like Jephtha’s daughter wandering on the mountains.”
“Do I know Jephtha’s daughter?” asked Ilka.
“Jephtha won the Lord’s battle after he promised to sacrifice the first thing that ran to meet him when he returned home, which, of course, happened to be not his puppy dog but his only daughter. ‘Grant me two months,’ Jephtha’s daughter says, ‘so that I may go and wander on the mountains and bewail my virginity, my companions and I,’ and she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity in the mountains. Except Bethy has no companions. Hello, Bethy. Your father is looking for you. You have the kind of hair I want to get my hands into. Make your parents bring you round. I’m going to brush it for you. Hello Alicia! Alvin, don’t go around looking so cheerful.”
“We’ve come from the students’ jazz combo, and they are so good.”
“The Emperor’s clothes,” Eliza said. “The years I persuaded myself I liked jazz! If it just didn’t have that thump thump.”
“Dear Eliza!” said Alvin cheerfully. “There’s Bach for you around the other side of the library.”