The Little Clan
Page 1
A love letter to classic literature and an illuminating look at newfound adulthood
Ava Gallanter is the librarian in residence at the Lazarus Club, an ancient, dwindling Manhattan arts club full of eccentric geriatric residents stuck in a long-gone era. Twenty-five-year-old Ava, however, feels right at home. She leads a quiet life, surrounded by her beloved books and sequestered away from her peers.
When Ava’s enigmatic friend Stephanie returns after an unplanned year abroad, the intoxicating opportunist vows to rescue Ava from a life of obscurity. Stephanie, on the hunt for fame and fortune, promises to make Ava’s dream of becoming a writer come true, and together they start a Victorian-inspired literary salon at the Lazarus Club. However, Ava’s romanticized idea of the salon quickly erodes as Stephanie’s ambitions take the women in an unexpected—and precarious—direction.
In this humorous yet keenly observant coming-of-age story, Cohen brings us into a boisterous literary world bathed in hubris and ambition. With eloquent prose and affecting storytelling, The Little Clan is both a wickedly fun yet sharply insightful look at friendship, feminism and finding yourself in your twenties.
The Little Clan
Iris Martin Cohen
For Matthew, for handing me the match.
Contents
EPIGRAPH
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
PART TWO
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
—Karl Marx
“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men.”
—Virginia Woolf
PART ONE
1
Ava waited, watching the stopped clock. Just before the hour, every hour, a faulty mechanism caused both hands to pause a moment too long, delaying their loud rhythmic clicking. The intrusion of this sudden silence into the room, no matter how regularly it occurred, always grabbed her attention. She remained trapped, stuck in pointless suspense until released by high, tremulous, inevitably disappointing chimes and then the ticking began again. The sphinx on the mantel who cradled the clock face between its breasts looked back at her, bored and imperious. Finally, the gold beast condescended to strike noon, and Ava returned to her writing.
She pushed down too hard on a rusty quill, and it sputtered and burped ink—Prussian blue. The noise of the clock receded back into the oblivion of her creative absorption; she was practicing her signature. Unable to find a satisfying way to connect the second letter of her name to all the flourishes she wanted for her first initial, she was coming around to the idea of a terse “A. Gallanter” which seemed to denote a masculine seriousness of purpose. She was writing a novel, or more accurately not writing, a grand panoramic, perhaps multiple-volume indictment of what she considered the callow ugliness of modern society. It hadn’t been going so well.
Her models and inspiration were close at hand—Balzac, Zola, Trollope, Proust, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, all her favorite great men of the nineteenth century, lined the shelves of the Lazarus Club library, dusty and bound in morocco leather—the intellectual patrimony of the grand but faltering social club where she worked as a librarian.
Once in a while a club member came to finish a brandy or nap in one of the leather chairs scattered around, but for the most part Ava’s duties were pretty nominal, and she was free to while away her days in the magnificent building that lined up so nicely with her aesthetic preferences and dream of authorial grandeur. Even if, for now, this ambition was spent covering pages in the overly elaborate twists and whorls of her signature.
But this club, where stained glass doors and creaky hallways opened onto ballrooms and parlors where old ladies roosted, as glassy-eyed and immobile as the stuffed peregrine falcons perched above the front door, seemed to comfort and abet her lack of industry. Once the Lazarus Club had been bustling, an opulent and exclusive playground for the upper echelons of New York Society to gather, to dine, to dance, and, according to its oft-quoted mission, discuss arts, letters and philosophy. One hundred and fifty years later, it persisted on a quiet uptown street, barely solvent, a last refuge for its affluent and elderly members to hide from an increasingly diverse and democratic world, eating Waldorf salads and snoring through the occasional social mixer.
Ava loved it. It was as if someone had conjured an Edith Wharton novel all around her, a magnificent setting in which she could be the star, the main character in all of her novelistic daydreaming. Here, beneath the chandeliers, surrounded by the dim glow of sumptuous, slightly frayed interiors, she never saw anyone her own age, and was more than content to chat with the old ladies about fountain pens and light operettas and third-rate Victorian detective stories, while managing to ignore their more egregiously antiquated opinions.
Ava took a quick sip from the bottle of cheap port in her top drawer and hiccuped, the goofy pop echoing loudly in the empty room. Drinking alone always made her maudlin, but today she had good reason to be sad. It was her twenty-fifth birthday, and this felt like a crisis. Having always thought of herself as an ingenue, the winsome, young Estella character in Great Expectations, she was now having to consider she might be curdling into Miss Havisham. At what age did being a virgin cease to be cute and start to become ridiculous? Twenty-five was too old, an invisible line had been crossed; she was past her prime, an expired commodity, and it made her feel a little desperate.
She had had that last chance two years ago, at the going-away party for her best and only friend, Stephanie. After college graduation, Stephanie had convinced Ava to move with her to New York, where “everything important was happening,” only to abruptly decide to leave town—and Ava—a year later. Ava had tried to convince her that “The International Model Agency” offering her representation and based in Kiev was surely a scam, but such was Stephanie’s fearless commitment to her path, the blazing, and often confusing trajectory that was going to lead her to an ill-defined stardom, that Ava hadn’t been able to talk her out of it. She had never been very good at arguing with Stephanie.
Among the packed-up boxes of their shared apartment, Stephanie had pushed Ava and a very drunk bartender of her acquaintance into the tiny windowless closet that had been Ava’s bedroom. “Here, he loves books, you guys talk about literature.” Soon Stephanie wouldn’t be around to engineer these kinds of situations, and, worried that this might be her last chance, Ava had tried to enjoy his sweaty hands under her shirt while he mumbled something about The Catcher in the Rye. But thinking of Stephanie’s imminent departure, tears kept rolling down Ava’s face and falling into the crest of this stranger’s dark, greasy hair. Silent weeping would have probably even been fine, but no one can have sex with a girl who is crying the wet, snotty wail of true abandonment. And so that evening her virtue had remained intact. And had these past two lonely years.
The waxed hallway floor creaked, and Ava quickly hid her bottle as the honorable Lazarus Club president, Aloysius Wendell Wilder III, shuffled into the room. Pink-cheeked and boyish despite his seventy years, his hair fluttered around his head, a stark and unnatural shade of black that wandered onto his forehead and mad
e him look like he had been carelessly dipped in ink. He lived in rooms at the back of the club and never seemed to leave the premises. Ava liked him because he had hired her without any qualifications. She had been standing on the sidewalk, gazing up at the awning and the cryptic insignia of its wrought iron doors, amazed that such places could still exist—it seemed to have just sprung from the pages of books she loved so much. Lurking in the foyer and sensing a kindred spirit, Aloysius had swept her in through the doors like a hawk retrieving its young and hired her to manage their books for an absurdly low salary. But because his offer included a tiny rent-free apartment in the back of the club, exactly the safe haven she had been looking for since being tossed roommateless into the storm of New York, she’d gratefully accepted. She’d moved in with her cat, Mycroft, determined to finally write her novel, and since then had hardly left the premises either, another source of kinship with the club president.
Aloysius fingered a small cherub on the mantelpiece, then slipped it into the pocket of his navy blazer. He liked to rearrange things. “You like dogs,” he said in a sudden, accusatory mid-Atlantic bray.
That morning in the hallway they been discussing Persian cats, but Ava nodded politely. “Yes.”
He pulled a brochure from the inner pocket of his navy blazer and handed it to her. “Westminster. The pooches are glorious this year. Miss Wharton’s pug once did his tinkles in the parlor fireplace. She was a member of this club, you know. A wonderful animal.”
“I love dogs.” He was her boss and her landlord, and having not formally signed a lease, she generally tried to be obliging. “And Edith Wharton too, I guess.” Ava did, fervently, but pretended to prefer Henry James. He seemed more respected, and she didn’t want people to think she wasn’t serious.
He fondled the figurine in his pocket. “I’ve come for a book.”
Surprised by the request—this was an hour usually spent trying not to wake the club members snoring off a lunchtime gin and tonic—she sat straighter with what she hoped was a professional alertness. “Yes?”
“I need The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”
“That’s easy. You don’t have it.”
“Are you sure?”
She was. She would have known if one of her favorite books had been hiding among the transcendent randomness of the Lazarus collection: the nineteenth-century manuals on brain surgery, the firsthand accounts of racially suspect explorations, lesser novels of lesser novelists. As a kid, her copy had become thick and crinkled, the pages coarse from having been dropped too many times in the bathtub, the only place she could be sure her mother wouldn’t wobble by, stiletto heels in a cloud of Cutty Sark, and scold her for being “odd and unsociable.” As Ava grew, the fancier annotated edition that had replaced it had become almost black from enthusiastic underlining. If it had been on these shelves, she would have known.
“I have to say I’m very disappointed.” He looked at Ava sternly. “Imagine guests coming from all over the world to discuss some very important irregularities in this work this afternoon, and we don’t even have a copy to put up on display. It does not look good. Not at all. I just don’t know what I am going to tell them.” He started to wander away, scratching the back of his head, and muttering.
“Wait,” said Ava. “Are you talking about the Baker Street Irregulars?”
“All very irregular. Couldn’t agree more. Actions will have to be taken.” With this not very clear clarification, he left.
Ava folded her wrists, lightly scarred with the marks of teenage sadness, over her desk, drumming her fingers, trying to stay calm. It had to be them; the Lazarus Club was always hosting odd groups and fellowships. The Baker Street Irregulars were the pinnacle of Sherlock Holmes fan clubs; she had always dreamed of joining. But by the time she fell in love with Holmes and Watson, too many years of bullying she had endured at school had left her terrified of any kind of group or social dynamic, her shyness calcified around her.
Ava couldn’t say when it originated—her conviction that life was full of unspoken rules that she was sure to be on the wrong side of. In their big suburban house on the outskirts of New Orleans, icy with air-conditioning year-round, her mom, smelling sweetly of alcohol, had seemed vaguely disappointed in her for reasons Ava didn’t understand for as long as she could remember. Her sense of transgression only worsened after she was plucked from a cozy synagogue preschool and sent to the elegant and prestigious Academy of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus, where she struggled mightily to understand the many obscure rituals and ways of the gentiles. Her early youth was just a blur of anxious fretting.
But one day, a sympathetic school librarian had given her Little Women. All at once, Ava discovered the world of books, warm, inviting, forgiving, and she fell into it and in love with Jo March in particular, deciding that she too would grow up to be a writer. Her identification was so passionate that after reading the chapter where Jo sells her hair, Ava also cut all of hers off with a pair of blunt scissors from art class. This hadn’t gone well. Laughingly calling her a boy, her classmates had blocked her from the girls’ bathroom until finally, in terrible humiliation, pee ran down the long white knee socks of her uniform. When her mother came to pick her up, she too had seemed inexplicably enraged at her daughter’s short messy hair—a disgrace to the family, she had said, lighting another cigarette, and making Ava ride home, damp and ashamed, on the crinkly plastic of an old Saks shopping bag.
When Ava returned to Little Women, desperate for solace and finding it in the loving idea of the March family, after that, old books were all Ava would read. As though her only hope for love and acceptance was somehow tied up in petticoats and horse-drawn carriages. Thereafter no matter how many times she was pushed into garbage cans or excluded at lunch, or teased or mocked, she was sure it was just a symptom of being born in the wrong time, and the thought consoled her, and pushed her further into the open arms of classic literature.
But if Jo March was the light of her childhood, Sherlock Holmes was the lodestar of her adolescence. What joy she found, watching him slice through people’s lies and deceptions—those motivations that held such fear and mystery to Ava—and see him triumph, his oddness and his introversion brandished proudly and unapologetically. His victories became Ava’s. He was smart and moody, vain yet self-defeating, overly sensitive, rather lazy, resplendently his own prickly, complicated self, and still, somehow, he was loved; he had a friend. And so there was hope for her. She often skimmed past the actual cases, hunting instead for those moments of intimacy between Holmes and Watson, burrowing into the warmth of their companionship, their little nation of two. Such was the whispered promise of the Sherlock Holmes books, and Ava read the stories over and over, late at night, turning pages with an urgent, clammy, confused yearning.
But the Baker Street Irregulars would understand all of this. And they were coming to her domain because, like Ava, they also loved the nineteenth century’s greatest detective, and this building was right out of his world. Persian rugs and rusty chandeliers and busts of forgotten notables, the Lazarus Club let dreams of empire linger, the twilight remnants of a dying tradition that for the shy, the strange and the bookish, was more real, more welcoming than the bright, jangling city passing just beyond the bay window. They were her people, and they were coming here.
The afternoon crept on with the gentle imperceptibility that time acquired inside the club, as Ava paced and fidgeted, retwisting the complicated mess of heavy braids she always wore as if just the right arrangement of hair might crystallize her resolve. The port dipped lower and lower in the bottle, and a violet stain was spreading unnoticed across her lips. A summer draft stole through an open window, barely stirring the room. Eventually sounds of movement and conversation drifted up from the bar. The event must have started. She unhooked a stocking from her garter and pulled it up to smooth out all of the creases and sags. Real silk stockings always pooled around her ankles, bu
t she clung to arbitrary rituals—no panty hose, no typewritten letters, no ballpoint pens, the candlestick beside her bed, a boar bristle hairbrush—that made her feel closer to the characters in the books that still dominated her emotional life and kept her company.
But again, this was the sort of thing the Baker Street Irregulars would sympathize with. The tremulous demarcation between fiction and reality was their raison d’être; their core tenet was that Sherlock Holmes really existed, and that Arthur Conan Doyle was the fictional construct. She would go down, she who was such a stickler for etiquette, despite not having an invitation; she belonged by right of common sympathy.
Down the long dark hallway that led from the library to the bar, portraits of former club presidents watched her sternly from behind walrus moustaches and glistening pince-nez. At the top of the stairs, an antique wicker pagoda of finches rattled and shook. She paused next to a gold nymph whose outstretched torch lit the foot of the banister. The foyer was still. It was only four in the afternoon, but heavy carpets and velvet drapes dampened the noises of life passing on the streets outside. Here, beneath a large painting of a seraglio—ladies sprawled in pillowy idleness—life was reassuringly immobile. No breeze ever stirred the crystals that hung from porcelain lamp shades or the enormous tasseled ropes that hung in the doorways. Someone laughed in the bar, and Ava felt the old ache of standing alone on thresholds where life seemed to be always taking place on the other side. But for once, she took courage and crossed the hall.
Under a dusty Tiffany skylight, the mirror of a carved oak bar caught the lights reflected in bottles in a twinkling line, and Rodney, the club bartender, arms crossed, was yawning. Tall and thin, with the pale, ascetic face of an Eastern Orthodox icon and the politics of the former Eastern Bloc, he greeted Ava happily. “A vision from the one place in this dump that doesn’t smell like old people. I swear you bring the scent of vanilla cake and jelly beans with you wherever you go.”