The Grand Surprise

by Leo Lerman

  And, as always, midnight is here, and so am I—bleary-eyed, for I have read over 250 pages of [Virginia Woolf's] The Years. This time I find it even more beautiful than before. It is so exact and so sad, because it is all about time. These last days have been an oasis really, despite aloneness, because they are like weeks I breathed away before January last, when I went to work. Reading, writing a little, brooding, eating little nothings, listening to the radio, little plans and projects forming like clouds then melting and merging or just drifting away, lying abed the whole day through, telephoning just anybody at all… such a lovely, lazy, rich man's life. It's so pleasant to live it for a day or two again and make believe that tomorrow night, the holiday ending, you will be returning from Middletown … and I shall be sitting waiting for you and almost dying of excitement and breathlessness, just to hear you come up the street a little after midnight—or earlier. How rich I am and happy in memories, and these do not sadden me or depress me. I am sort of drowsy with heat and reading and remembering.

  You are asleep at five in the morning, which is what it must be where you are, with your foolish mouth wide open and a thumb in it and an ear clutched? My lovely ears … nobody ever pays them any mind … but I do. Good night. Be a good child and come back safely—yowyow … snufit… twhow … yimp.

  JULY 6, 1949 • 5 P.M. • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PARIS

  Such a curious thing has happened: Mrs. [Grace] Vanderbilt has asked me to tea! I couldn't be more astonished. First, she asked me to dinner tomorrow night, and I said I was engaged. Then she asked me to lunch, and I said I was engaged. So then she said, “Well, you must be an exceedingly busy man…. Can you come to tea this afternoon?” and I said yes. So, in ten minutes I am going. I kind of have stage fright because, after all, I've been curious about her and her house ever since I've been a small child.12

  9 P.M.

  So I went to tea with Mrs. Vanderbilt, and I had a good time, and now we are buddies. How we used to conjure over her torn curtains and her headbands. She's really so very amusing and sweet and kind—like anybody's great-grandmother!

  Now it seems that I'm actually supposed to go to stay with the Astors at Rhinebeck next month. I was very kind to a gawky young man who was brought to my Mademoiselle party [on June 20], and he turned out to be Ivan Obolensky, son of Prince Obolensky and Alice Astor.13 So now his mother and his grandmother have asked me to come and stay with them, and it's very funny to me. My being very kind consisted of introducing him to a flock of girls, and he told his family, and they were so pleased. All the time I was sitting at Mrs. Vanderbilt's, and she was holding my hand, I thought of Momma and Aunt Silly [Celia Goldwasser] … and I couldn't explain, if anyone had asked me, why I was so amused, but you would have understood. This is really the first time I've felt gay in years…. I guess I needed a little glimpse of a world completely unlike my world to set me up.

  JULY 18, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PARIS

  It doesn't matter much to me what people think about us, because I know the truth, and this truth is mine utterly and it is good…. When I die—now don't be angry at this, because you are the only person whom I can tell these silly things to (and anyway it won't be for years)—please see that I am buried in that yellow bathrobe, the one with the slit and the moth holes, which you gave me. I love it dearly and I have been very happy in it, and it feels like you to snuggle me for all eternity—not that I feel quite comforted about eternity—and won't it look gay on Judgment Day? How lucky I am to have one real deep love and to have it complete now within me, not to want anything from it save that you should be contented. How many people ever have that? I shouldn't have involved Gray, but I was weak, and I think that I do him more good than harm. When he returns, I know that I will make him grow more independent, because I am strong enough for several people. I guess I really feel that he's my child. I get rebellious about that sometimes, but I have a feeling that he's going to turn out. I don't really resent Howard anymore, and I have, at last, become sorry for him … because now I know, in some little measure, what contentment can be. I have it, and he doesn't, really, because he is the way he is, and that makes me sorry for him. Do you know that now, at last, I really love you, without jealousy or anything acquisitive to impair or mar this love? And for the first time I do feel free in it, and right now I am deeply happy? You know, I don't mind living alone [these weeks]…. I wouldn't mind at all if there was someone to feed me and care for the house and the knowledge that one day you would appear.

  JULY 29, 1949 • WOODS HOLE, MASSACHUSETTS

  TO TRUMAN CAPOTE • TANGIERS, MOROCCO

  You have probably never received those delicious epistles which I never wrote—let alone sent. But there you are selling grain in the marketplace with little Jane [Bowles]—and now both of you adored by Berbers and strange wide-eyed men such as have never adored me.14 When are you coming home to your sweet old bald-head mom? When I pause to think, I realize that the me has gone out of my life, and then I realize that you've been gone ever so long, but, of course, each to his own hell and far be it from me to covet another's hot coals. I read a little story by Paul Bowles in George Mayberry's new anthology [A Little Treasury of American Prose], and it is about where you are. For heaven's sake and mine, too, please keep away from camel bladders.15 It's an awful, malignant story. Are you writing precious little words—each worth a small fortune—very small currently what with taxes. I've been here at the Normans these last ten days at Woods Hole, and it's heaven—loads of servants— and several yachts—and such magnificent food and witty conversation (this last is my contribution), and it's even more heavenly because Mademoiselle pays me while I loll and sparkle and display all my lovely finery, which I borrowed from some friendly sewer rats. Oh my dear—N.Y has no ton (a French word meaning class) sans (a French word meaning without) toi—(a French word meaning you, but very familiar!). Now I must go in to breakfast. Gray is in California—so while the mice are away the cat is all play!—love, Myrt—meaning love me. Write!!! I collect stamps.

  JULY 29, 1949 • WOODS HOLE, MASSACHUSETTS

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • VENICE

  Do you remember that point of land which you see on the right as you leave Woods Hole on the Nantucket boat—that long point on which there are some huge houses? Well, I am sitting in a big bed, looking out over the water, the Nantucket boat has just wailed, and I am here for ten days in one of those houses. The house I am in is owned by Dorothy and Kiddo [her husband, Edward Norman]. Allene and Dick [Plaut, her husband] are here, and it is really heaven, because it is not modern, but beautiful, full of flowers and lovely old furniture and pictures and maids, who turn your bed down, and a superb cook, and a gardener, who wheels your lunch down to the beach. I am luxuriating in this lovely rich life—with nothing to do except eat and be waited on and giggle. You would love it here—if you liked Dorothy. I have a wonderful browntan face, and my forearms are a little sunburned, but I feel absolutely well for the first time in years. Oh, what bliss: Through all the windows you see water—like my room at Nantucket. This is a kind of storybook house.

  JULY 31

  The ten-minute bell has just been clanged by Sarah (an old, dyed-black-haired Irishwoman with very dark red, high cheeks), and Dorothy, sitting in a light blue bathing dress in the lower garden, dictating to her secretary (also in bathing dress, white) both on a long bench beside the big lily pool, has not moved. Edward, across the harbor has possibly heard the bell, but only as a ghost bell. The great bees bumble among the spotted Turkish lilies—and the sprinklers whoosh—and all the world is rainbows—and glittering drops—a little wooded island in the foreground fixes it—makes it by its isolation, by its permanence, forever. I have put a peaked blue cap on my head, and now here comes Edward, rowing swiftly, for he has heard the bell or he is hungry, and now Dorothy rises and pats her shoulders, and Simone gathers their papers. It is lunchtime. Sarah clangs her bell again, again, aga
in.

  JULY 31, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • VENICE

  Now it is night rushing beside this train with everyone riding doubly in the night—inside the lighted train and outside in the dark. I had forgotten how one is always attended by an almost perfect reflection of oneself in the window during night rides. Over Providence the sky was filled with magnificently terrible (meaning awesome) colors—blood in all shades—from fresh red to black clotted. There's autumn in the sunset sky these days. I am always amazed at looking up and finding a bearded, spectacled, interesting-looking middle-aged man in the dark window beside me. And it's me—there—and I feel as though I had dressed up to be that person—because inside it's yesterday in Central Park on a spring evening with a robin singing16—and all sorts of other days and nights when I wasn't middle-aged and bearded—but it's fun, too.

  AUGUST 2, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • VENICE

  There is never a moment when I am not you and you not me. It is as though we existed not at all beside one another, but in one another. That is why when we are apart each is a little less vivid—each of us is diminished, vague in certain areas, for each of us is there and still not there but with the other. It sounds complicated, but it isn't. The only pity of it is that we have involved other people—and we must not hurt anyone—there is too much hurt, please don't let's add to it. Anyway, who can plan his future save in dreams, and how many dream true in the way they expect?17

  AUGUST 14, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • FLORENCE

  Here I am in my untidy bed, where I have been since 10:30 p.m., exhausted from a day at the Lerman Picnic Grove—familiarly yclept [called] Lerman's Folly. Poppa has been insisting that he was going to move the house himself— with Jerry—and since this would probably cripple them both—and since he is obstinate—the only way I could get him to promise not to do it was by telling him that I would give him the $200 needed to have it moved. So, now I'll have to think of some way to make this up. I guess the powers that watch over me will help. But I had to do this, to save Jerry, really. I'll give them my Vogue money, which I had planned to use for other necessities. Momma revealed that they have spent the $40,000 even before they got it, having borrowed on it. Then Momma said that she hoped I would finish a book soon because they really needed quite a lot of money. I instantly decided never to write another if that was to be the consequence. I guess I am in quite a temper. Then she announced that she was going to have her hair cut and to get a permanent and that I was going to pay for it. I told her that as far as I knew I wasn't. Oh, well— this is the same story. If I had lots of money and had paid my debts, I wouldn't mind—but if my job ends in January, will Momma give me anything? That's a useless question.

  AUGUST 23, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  to richard hunter • florence

  Eleonora is back! She made The Knife with Gene Kelly. She played a mad Italian woman.18 In six weeks she returns to make another. I always said that she'd become the grand old lady of American movies. Most of all, she returning means soon you will be here. It's more than half over. Isn't that mean of me to be so selfish? But what a desert (the kind with sand) this has been. In about two hours G. Foy will be here. I have stage fright. Gosh—how I used to sit and wait for you—all over this city—breathlessly—until I thought that I would perish of suffocation—and my heart pounding and way up in my throat a huge lump. And that time at Yaddo when you came through the doorway, and I got up and moved out from the table as though a string pulled me straight to you—and that, strangely enough, was a turn in the screw which finally made us what we are today. But what a heavenly life, so full of happiness and agonies. I wouldn't have changed any of it—save to have had a larger or two apartments on the same floor—and a maid.

  AUGUST 28, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • FLORENCE

  Gray has returned determined to be happy and good and he is really trying very hard. So far it's very pleasant having him here—so happy and sweet—and I do hope that he can continue this way. It's heaven. He did three and one half drawings, while he was away, and part of a small painting—very pretty—like an explosion of thought in a bee's brain—all golden-silvery-brown. I hope though he gets some money from that monster Kirk [Askew].19

  OCTOBER 10, 1949 • NEW YORK CITY

  TO RICHARD HUNTER • PARIS

  This is a sad letter so read it slowly, Tibby dear. I am sad about [the sale of the Hunter house in] Middletown, and if I knew where to call you I would. Well, we all do get forced to grow up, and now this house will have to be our home for a time.

  I guess I had best tell you now, so it won't be too much of a shock later: I have had to sell all my books. And it broke my heart a little bit, but you would have been proud of me, because I didn't show it. I did it to get Jerry money he had to have because Momma and Poppa mismanaged. It was selling a little bit of my future and a great part—really almost all—of my visible past. I got $2,000 and gave it to Jerry. This was most painful. I lost fifteen pounds—which is good. It's too complicated to tell all. Gray was wonderful, but I wanted you like a small child wants somebody he knows is good from the past. Darling Tib— now we are quite grown up. I stole some of the books while they were being packed. Gray and Eugenia [Halbmeier] helped. It was like Southerners hiding their treasures because the Yanks were coming. I saved the Stanislavsky you gave me (Gray hid it) and the Virginia Woolf and the Proust. When they really took the books away, I only cried when I remembered all the times and places we bought the books—but that's growing up, and I am sure I'll have others— and it will be fun again.20

  SADLER'S WELLS AND MARGOT FONTEYN The most beautiful party I have seen in Manhattan? The American debut, opening night, of Sadler's Wells Ballet. Stars, corps, supers, conductor, and the guiding dragon leapt from our city's old yellow school buses, the Ballet transported from their fairyland on the stage of the old Metropolitan Opera House to a Manhattan— just for this one fragile night—on the lawn of the mayor's mansion. Dozens of tables on the green lawns sweeping toward the moon-glinting river, crimson-seated golden party chairs ringing the pink, flower-decked tables, red-coated waiters, a cross-hatching of held-high silver trays, shrubberies twined with fairy lights, eddies of men in white-tie, black-tie, women in whatever newly revived Paris had sold them. The lights blazed again, at least in Manhattan, jewels all out of heirloom vaults, effulgence, sparkle, and the band played on and on. This is all about hope and rebirth, a possible glorious future: If England, so devastated, could produce this gorgeous magic, this life-assuring triumph, then all was right with “our” world, at least for this radiant moment.

  For months I had been hearing about the splendors of this Sleeping Beauty. “Wait until you see what Freddie [Ashton] has done with the Apotheosis. Wait!” Alice [Astor] told me over and over. I had heralded this “dream” in Mademoiselle, talked endlessly about it with Allene at Vogue, plotted with Carmel about it at Harper's Bazaar, for I was the only one who had a persuasive tongue and a hardworking hand simultaneously at all three, and now I knew that the embodiment of that “dream” was Margot Fonteyn. From the moment we perceived this pink flower-petal child rushing, remote beyond Oliver Messel's high-flung baroque arches, balustrades, rushing to a Grand Surprise, to Love, to Life, this small, piquant-faced, wide-eyed, dark-haired girl in her pink tutu was immediate assurance. The world was good, at last again, the world was good. Goodness emanated from Margot Fonteyn like a perfume. There was always this about the Margot I came to know—no matter what mean streets she walked.21 (1993)

  JOURNAL • JANUARY 2, 1950 Why are [soprano] Jennie Tourel and [harpsichordist] Wanda Landowska interested and delighted by scatological humor? It leaves me absolutely untouched—isolated. Why does it do this to me? I almost never see any humor in copulation or procreation, for it is so sublime— the emotion and sensation which arises from the act of love—why debase it? The robust Italian treat
ment—that is something else, for there is nothing snide or behind-the-barn about it. It is all natural as the act itself. And so with Elizabethan and Restoration comedy, or the French formal farces and comedies, or the limericks of Norman Douglas. But dirty jokes are not amusing to me, and I do not think that this indicates thin blood.

  APRIL 29, 1950 In bed again, because of being tired—and probably because I have a couple of deadlines. I am so resistant to writing that if this goes on I should find another way to exist. The idea of meeting a deadline becomes increasingly horrible. I am almost too weary to hold this notebook and pencil— but this must be mental, because of not wanting to write the review and the piece. I'll rest a bit and then try to work…. Such laxity—no one who wrote anything put off this way. The moment I have a deadline I do nothing save endless research, but the writing—oh, no—even little memos or notes or paying bills, anything which means shouldering a burden, giving up just existing, just riding on the tide from moment to moment… I'll try now to drift into working—gradually—pampering—ugh.

  So this whole day, during which I have been so intensely depleted, has been an intermeshing of time past and time present: a band suddenly quivering the window glass as they thumped this morning, calling up those bands thirty years ago bringing heroes home from Armentières and the Marne and what was left of the Argonne. But the past is multiplied by the present and surrounds it like that quivery haze of heat that shimmers everywhere—on pavements, walls, flowers—and is a thin, tenuous pulsing veil between window frame and window ledge on a hot summer day.