“Is that a reproach?”
“Not in the least, my dear fellow. You know how I feel about that sort of thing. If a man can’t delegate most of his work at fifty, he’s either a dunce or a Napoleon. No, I’m wondering what you do with your life. Do you have any hobbies? Are you a Sunday painter? Or do you simply gaze at the sky and think great thoughts?”
The bantering tone of Tilney’s question did not in the least conceal its genuine friendliness and concern. Madison was surprised to feel, for the first time in many years, that sharp pricking little urge to confide in another human. As he gazed back into his partner’s sympathetic grey eyes, he moistened his lips and after a silence that was beginning to be embarrassing, began: “Well, as a matter of fact, I have what you might call a hobby—”
But he stopped. He stopped, frozen, on the edge of this new precipice. Talk about his diary? It was appalling; it was unthinkable. He shook his head quickly several times, as if to awaken himself. “It’s my social life,” he concluded lamely.
“Great Scott, man!” Tilney exploded. “You don’t mean to sit there and tell me that all you care about is to dress up in a monkey suit and exchange banalities with stupid women?”
Madison wondered if he had ever wanted anything so much as he now wanted to have Tilney read the diary. But it was out of the question. Tilney would have been scandalized at the entries about his partners and clients, about the innermost workings of the firm, about Tilney himself. Besides, his personality was too powerful. Even if he liked the diary, in some bullying fashion he would try to put his own stamp on it.
“I take a broader view of social life than you do, Clitus,” Madison said meekly. “To me it’s more than a matter of monkey suits and stupid women. I like to think I’m observing a microcosm of the world. Everything, you know, can be contained in everything else. Isn’t it a question of the power of one’s lens?”
“I suppose it is, of course,” Tilney said gruffly, and, giving up, he turned the conversation to office matters.
Madison discovered in the weeks that followed that the seeds which Tilney had so officiously scattered were growing with tropical speed into the jungle of his own uneasiness. His evening delight of dipping into the old volumes of the diary was now curtailed by the most agitating speculations. What would Tilney think of it? What would his other partners think? What would his ex-wife, long since remarried and contentedly living in Pasadena? Would they laugh? Or would they be impressed? Even dazzled? Was it enough to be thought all one’s life a mere clover lawyer and diner-out and only to be posthumously appreciated at one’s true worth? If there were no life hereafter, what would it gain him to have his diary acclaimed? Madison began to feel that he had to have at least one reader. At least one judge in his lifetime. But whom? Nobody seemed to have just the right qualifications. They were all too close to him or too distant, too ignorant or too terrifyingly knowing, too kind or too malicious. He started thumbing the Social Register and ended with the Manhattan Directory.
There was, however, one name that reoccurred on every list that he jotted down, and that was Aurelia Starr. Mrs. Starr was a widow, without children or other visible appendages, a few years younger than himself, with a small but adequate income, a trim and well-clad figure, who managed, for the proverbially unwanted extra woman, to get herself asked out nearly as widely as Madison himself. She was very decorative, with her dark, sleek hair, her long eyebrows rising to her temples, her widely parted blue eyes, her straight Egyptian nose. She might have had some of the elegance of a Nefertiti had she not trembled with an American widow’s insecurity. But Aurelia, for all her nervous charm, was “safe.” She was supposed, like all the unattached of her sex, to be after a husband, but she was so kind, so considerate, so understanding, such a good sport, that no man felt there was any danger of a dinner-table flirtation being taken too seriously. It was probably for just this reason that poor Aurelia had not rewed. Like Madison himself she was too good a listener.
When he sat beside her at dinner the next time, in the penthouse of a theatrical designer, he for once had no eyes or ears for the other guests. All he could think of, as he listened to her quiet, tense, pleasant chatter, was the question of showing her the diary. When the party was over, he took her home in a taxi, and she asked him up to her apartment for a drink. It was the kind of invitation that as a prudent single man he ordinarily declined, but now he hesitated.
“Oh, do come up, Morris,” she urged him. “You and I meet and talk so often, and I love it, of course, but what do we ever really say? What do any of us ever really say in social life? Couldn’t we try to talk for once, just you and me?”
“We could try.”
In her tiny white and gold living room, that gloried in an Aubusson rug and Hubert Robert panels, he took a long draft of whiskey and relaxed.
“It’s true that people talk banalities at parties,” he agreed. “They like it that way. They think any real communication would be too much work. And then they complain of loneliness.” He snorted in derision.
“Are you never lonely?”
“I think I can honestly say I’m not.”
Aurelia laughed. “You sound very superior. With whom do you communicate? Or don’t you?”
“I communicate with the future.”
When she paused to consider this, he hoped that she would not try too hard to be sympathetic. But she was simplicity itself. “And how do you do that?”
“By keeping a diary. Or a journal. I’m not sure which you’d call it.”
“I can see the advantage to you. But how does the poor future get its word in?”
“That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. How can I arrange to let it?”
She mused. “Does it go back far, your diary?”
“Twenty-five years.”
“My goodness. And it’s complete?”
“As you can’t imagine.”
“Oh.” She seemed to be looking through him, her lips apart, as if she could dimly make out those red volumes in the cedar chest. “And now you want someone to see it. For an opinion? Do you want a historian or a professor of literature?”
“Hardly. I think I just want someone to tell me if it’s …” He paused to swallow and moisten his lips. “Well, if it’s real. I mean, if it really exists. I sometimes wonder. But I think I’ve found the person who can tell me. Do you suspect who it is, Aurelia?”
“Of course I do! But I’m doubling back and forth in my tracks. I’m scared stiff! Why should I be the one so honored?”
“Because you never appear in it.” He had not realized that this was so until the second before he said it, and immediately he understood that it might hurt her. “I don’t mean by that that there’s nothing to say about you. I mean that I must have always planned that you should be my reader.”
“But I can’t!” she protested, and the way she touched her middle fingers to the ends of her long eyebrows conveyed some of her tenseness. “It’s not simply that I’m scared of such a responsibility. I think you’re making a mistake. Once it’s shared, it isn’t really a diary any more. There wouldn’t still be that special intimacy between you and it. Be careful how you play with that!”
“Oh, but I know,” he exclaimed. “This has been no light decision, believe me. You should be very proud. My diary and I are choosy!”
“I am proud, dear Morris. But I’m not foolhardy.”
Nor was she. He was baffled and at length irritated to find that he could not move her. The most that he could obtain was her promise to discuss it on another occasion, and to do this he took her out for dinner the following week in a new Javanese restaurant. Aurelia had quite recovered her equanimity and was able to talk about the diary in a lively, even a facetious manner. She asked him all kinds of questions and seemed particularly fascinated by the mechanical details of its typing and storage. He told her about the safe deposit vault where one copy was always kept and described his plans for its posthumous publication and the trust to effect t
hem that he had established in his will.
“But we can’t talk all evening about my diary,” he interrupted himself, with perfunctory courtesy, when the dessert was placed on the table.
“You mean you’d rather talk about mine?”
“Do you keep one?” The sudden sharpness of his tone reflected the instant crisis of his jealousy. “But of course you do! It’s too obvious. How could I not have guessed it?”
“It’s just a line-a-day.”
“Just a line-a-day!” he retorted with a snort. “But, obviously, you love it. Obviously, you have visions of it being published.”
“Oh, Morris,” she protested laughing. “You’re too absurd!”
“Am I?” His tone was almost plaintive. “I see it all too clearly. Your diary will come out the same year as mine and put it completely in the shade. Oh, I can read those reviews as if they were written on that wall! ‘Although Mrs. Starr may not have the thoroughness of Mr. Madison, neither does she have his pedantry. Hers is the woman’s hand, the light touch that illuminates her era. The universities and the scholars will undoubtedly be grateful for Mr. Madison’s painstaking observations, but for that train trip, for that hospital gift, or even for reading aloud at the family hearth, we recommend Aurelia Starr.’”
“My dear friend, I promise you my diary is simply to keep track of dentist appointments and cleaning women.” Aurelia had stopped laughing and was serious again. “I’m in no way a writer. I like to talk. And, like a mirror, to reflect.”
“What do you reflect?”
“Well at the moment, you. Or perhaps your diary. I’m not always quite sure which. I’m like a confidant in a French tragedy. I may not exist when the hero’s offstage, but he tells me his thoughts. Or maybe just the ones that aren’t worthy of his diary. I wouldn’t have the presumption to compete with yours.”
She was very elusive, but she was equally charming. Their dinner was repeated the next week and then the following and soon became a Friday night habit. It was agreed that neither would accept another invitation, no matter how exalted, for that evening. Madison had never enjoyed the regular companionship of a sympathetic woman, and he was beginning to understand what he had missed. They discussed other things besides the diary, yet it continued to have significance in their relationship as a starting point, a link, as the leitmotif that symbolized their rare intimacy. Aurelia always raised her first cocktail of the evening with a little nod across the table that meant she was drinking to it.
At times he would think back ruefully over the crowded years in which he had lived so constantly with people, so rarely with friends, and wonder if he had not wasted his life by being so private. But then it would strike him that he could never have met another Aurelia, for Aurelia was unique. She seemed to have no self at all. She listened; she laughed; she sympathized, and when she talked it was always about the subject that he had raised. He had never imagined that another human could be so intuitively understanding.
“You realize, of course, that you’re spoiling me horribly,” he pointed out. “Shouldn’t we ever talk about your life?”
“I don’t have one. Or rather, this is it.”
“But you make me feel such a fatuous ass!”
“Do I? I’m sorry.”
“Not really, of course. Only when I stop to think what an egotist I’m becoming.”
“Don’t.” She was very clear about this. “My theory has nothing to do with egotism. I simply believe that communication can only exist between a man and a woman and then only when the man takes the lead. Don’t worry about me. I think I’m doing rather nicely.”
One result of their friendship was that his diary entries were becoming shorter and more matter-of-fact. He knew now that Aurelia would ultimately consent to read it, and his words no longer flowed when subject to her imagined scrutiny. It was like writing with her looking over his shoulder. This was not because he thought of her as necessarily critical; it was more that he could not imagine, well as he now knew her, just what her reaction would be. Once he went so far as to insert a flowery compliment to her in his description of one of their dinners, but he then ripped out the page. Perhaps as a diarist he needed a vacation. Perhaps he needed to do less observing and more thinking. For the first time in twenty-five years he let a week go by without a single entry. He was conscious at night of that neglected cedar closet from which he could imagine a must of reproach emanating, but he resolutely turned over in his bed, saying aloud: “You’ve had the best years of my life. It’s time you let me do a little living.”
Matters came logically to a head one early spring afternoon on a bench under the rustling trees of Bryant Park after a matinee of Tristan and Isolde. When Aurelia told him it was her favorite opera, he accused her jokingly of harboring a secret death wish.
“It’s better than being dead, anyway,” she retorted. “You, my dear, are dead and living in a downy heaven where you see your published diary having the greatest success imaginable.”
For once she had gone too far. “It seems to me that I live very much in the world,” he said gruffly.
“Yes. As a spy.”
“You say that because you know I keep a diary,” he protested. “People always assume that whatever a man does, he does at the expense of something else. I guess there’s only one way a diarist can persuade a beautiful woman that he’s more than that.”
She looked up quickly. “Oh, Morris,” she warned him.
“Only one,” he reiterated, firmly, his eyes fixed upon her.
“Be careful.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“That you’re going to propose to me!”
Madison was so startled that for a moment he could do nothing but shout with laughter. “But that’s exactly what everyone thinks you want!” he cried. “The world is always wrong, Aurelia.”
“The world is always libelous,” she said, flushing.
“Oh, my dear, forgive me. Forgive me and marry me!”
Her face immediately puckered up into what struck him as a curious blend of gratification and near panic. She looked like a child who wanted to cry and couldn’t.
“Do you mean it?”
“Of course I mean it.”
“Do you swear?”
“I swear! By … by my diary!”
Aurelia’s countenance cleared at this; already she resumed her mask. “My goodness, as serious as that? Then you must give me time.”
“Time for what?”
“Well, for one thing, to read the diary.”
“All of it?”
“That won’t be necessary. Give me one early volume and one in the middle and … the current one.”
Madison looked at her suspiciously. “You want to read where you come in?”
“What woman wouldn’t?”
“You’ll be disappointed. There’s very little about you.”
“Ah, but that’s just what I want to see!”
That night, perched on a high stool in the big cedar closet, Madison pulled volume after volume from the shelves and skimmed their pages. The mild pique occasioned by Aurelia’s failure to accept him right away vanished with the exuberance of choosing the volumes for her inspection. There was no longer any real question of the outcome; he could trust his faithful diary to plead his cause. And the thrill of thinking of her reading his choicest pages! It made for a giddy night. As a sample of his early work he picked the volume that covered the winter months of 1936. He had been working night after night on a big tax case, which gave to his entries a wonderful unity of mood. Madison liked to conceive of his diary pictorially, and this volume seemed to him a Whistler nocturne, with its dull grey foggy atmosphere of exhausting work, streaked here and there with the golden flashes of ambition. For the middle period he chose a little gem of a divorce story in high circles with which he had been professionally involved. And for the last … well, of course, he had to be honest and submit the latest volume, though he hated to have Aurelia end on a flat note. He
dated the blank page following the final entry and wrote: “My diary is to have its first reader. May she and it be friends!”
The next Friday night they were to meet as usual at their restaurant, and Madison, who arrived first, ordered a cocktail to dull the edge of his now almost unbearable excitement. As he was raising the glass to his lips, however, he saw Aurelia crossing the room towards their table, carrying the three red volumes which he had sent to her. He noted with instant dismay that she looked pale and haggard, as if she had not slept in two nights, and her eyes avoided his as she slipped into his seat. She pushed the books towards him, without a word, and he placed them carefully on the bench beside him.
“Is something wrong?”
“Oh, Morris, my friend, I don’t know how to tell you. Please order me a drink. No, let me have yours.” She took his glass and drank from it quickly. “I can’t stay for dinner. I’m all done in. I’m going to bed. I only came to return the books. I know how precious they are.”
“Are you ill?”
“No, just tired.”
“Was my poor diary so tedious?” he asked, with death in his heart.
She took another sip of his cocktail. “I tell you what,” she said abruptly. “I’ll have my little say, and then I’ll be off.” She paused, and when she spoke again there was a tremble of deep feeling in her voice. “Dear Morris, I hope that you and I will always be the best of friends. But I cannot marry you.”
“Because of the diary?”
“Because of the diary.”
“Is it so terrible?”
She seemed to consider this. “It’s a monster,” she said in a hushed, low tone. Again she paused and then relented a bit. “Though I suppose there’s nothing wrong with a monster if you don’t happen to be on its bill of fare.”
“And you are?”
“Oh, my dear, you should know that. Don’t you send a tribute of men and maidens each year to the labyrinth? No, I’m serious, Morris,” she exclaimed when he smiled. “You’ve created a robot! He’s grown and grown until you can no longer control him, and now he’s rampaging the countryside. I dared to face him. I tried to give you time to get away. I was even able to stand him off a while. But now my stones are gone, and Goliath is stalking towards me!”
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