Out of Time

by Paula Martinac

  27

  Just after Christmas I had a call from Emily Fleck.

  “Elinor is very ill,” she said quickly, with her no-nonsense air. “She picked up a chill outdoors, and it’s grown into pneumonia. She has some things she’d like to give you. Won’t you stop in?”

  “She didn’t like me,” I replied. “Our last meeting didn’t go well, as you recall.”

  “Urn, yes,” Fleck said, faltering.

  “She essentially threw me out.”

  “Yes,” Fleck said again. “But she’s reconsidered.”

  There was a long, awkward pause, in which I weighed what to do next. Say I’m very sorry and hang up? Or listen to Catherine’s tiny voice in my head, telling me this was probably my last chance to get information from a first-hand source?

  “When will I be able to see her?” I said.

  “Can you come today?” she asked, urgently.

  Tuttie managed the store in the afternoon while I traveled down to Grove Street. Unlike my other visits to Elinor, I had planned nothing to say or ask. And I had no idea what to expect.

  Fleck showed me into the hallway, with which I was well acquainted. She looked more stern than usual. What, I wondered, happened to such a faithful companion when her employer died? But then, I guessed, Elinor would leave her well provided for; maybe she would even get the house.

  Emily Fleck didn’t seem to be worried about money, though. “I’m concerned, I have to be honest, that you’ll upset her,” she said, biting on her lower lip. Her eyes were hollow with dark rings around them; she had probably been up the past few nights, listening for Elinor’s breathing, administering to her needs. “She didn’t want to go to a hospital, you see, so it’s all fallen on me,” she added as an explanation to something I hadn’t asked. “If you upset her, I don’t know what will happen.” She was on the edge of panic, her voice just a hair’s breadth from cracking.

  “I promise not to upset her,” I said, reaching out to pat her arm lightly. I did feel sorry for her. She’d been with Elinor for over twenty years, much of her adulthood. Like a married woman about to lose her spouse, or like Elinor when Sarah died, she must have been afraid of what came next.

  We ascended the staircase to the second floor. “We moved her up here because it’s warmer,” Fleck explained. “Her bedroom is actually downstairs, so she doesn’t have to manage those steps. She’s in the guest room now, and believe me, she doesn’t like it.”

  For one thing, it wasn’t yellow, but a serious, somber blue. Elinor must have known it was a room to die in. She was completely covered; only her head, which looked tiny against the huge white pillows and puffy down quilt, was showing. She looked as white as the sheets, and for a moment I considered the possibility that she had already died. But as I approached the bed, I could hear her shallow breathing.

  “Elinor,” Fleck said softly, laying a hand on her hair. “Susan Van Dine has come to see you.”

  Her eyes didn’t open till Fleck had repeated it. “We know you’re quite tired, dear, so she won’t stay long.”

  Fleck moved aside so I could place myself in Elinor’s narrow range of vision. “You,” Elinor said, and I smiled, thinking even on her deathbed, she was ready to confront me. “Lucy made me promise.”

  “Promise what?” I asked.

  “Not to tell her family,” she said through cracked lips.

  “Tell them what?” I persisted, as gently as I could.

  Elinor looked puzzled, as if she couldn’t understand why I was asking these questions. In her mind, sick as she was, she must have been relating a much more elaborate story.

  “I shouldn’t say,” she whispered. “You’ll tell someone. I shouldn’t say.”

  I took her hand and held it lightly. The fingers were cold, like the life was draining out of them.

  “There’s more than you know,” she said, her eyes closing. “The nurse. Cervenak. Sophia Cervenak.”

  “What nurse? Whose nurse?” I asked, but her eyes were fully closed, and Fleck was pulling lightly at my sleeve.

  “That’s all you’re going to get out of her,” she said sternly. “For God’s sake, the woman’s dying.”

  But Fleck wasn’t angry with me. In fact, she invited me to have tea with her downstairs. She was unaccustomed, she explained, to taking it alone.

  “Do you know what all that meant?” I asked over my cup of Earl Grey. “Who’s Sophia Cervenak? What’s she got to do with anything?”

  “Sounds familiar, but I can’t place her,” she said, sighing deeply. “All I know is there are some things she wants you to have.”

  We finished our tea quietly. I was really just a body to her, someone sipping and breathing across the tea tray, so she didn’t have to be alone. I had the good sense not to ask any more. I had waited this long, and there was no reason why I couldn’t wait a little longer.

  When I got home that night, I looked up Sophia Cervenak in every phone book I had—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens. Lots of “Cervenaks,” some with addresses, some without, but no Sophia. If I’d found the number, what would I have said anyway? “Elinor Devere mentioned you on her deathbed. Have you any idea why?”

  No, that wasn’t my style. Maybe I could coerce Catherine. I made a note of the name, so I could ask Bea Best about her later.

  • • •

  Catherine and I attended the funeral service at St. Luke’s-in-the-Fields near Elinor’s house. It was our second funeral together in less than a year, and I was thinking how unusually lucky we were not to have lost anyone to AIDS. I had never been to a funeral with a lover before these two with Catherine. Weddings, yes. Graduations, too. Even a bar mitzvah in Queens and a divorce party on the Upper East Side. Funerals seemed to bond people closer in a weird way, in their understanding of the fragility of life.

  The service was poorly attended. Elinor had few living friends and no relatives in this country. Most of the mourners were older women from the neighborhood, who also had brownstones and full-time companions. None of them went to the cemetery in Queens; it was bitterly cold that day, so it was just Fleck, Catherine, the minister, and I, plus the pallbearers, whom Fleck had paid for.

  The ceremony was short and unmemorable, over almost as soon as we arrived. Elinor was buried next to Sarah, her companion of so many years. They’d bought the plots almost thirty years before, and Sarah had used hers first. I touched the cool stone where it said “Sarah Frances Stern,” but then I caught the minister staring at me, so I stopped.

  We went back into the city with Fleck in Elinor’s car. I couldn’t think of anything to say, but Catherine assumed control of the situation. The three of us were in the roomy back seat, me in the middle, and Catherine and Fleck talked around me while I watched the back of the driver’s head.

  “What will you do now?” Catherine asked.

  “Stay on, I suppose,” Fleck said, wearily. “She’s left me the house and a bit of money. Most of the money goes to setting up a foundation to support people working in the peace movement.”

  “Oh,” Catherine said, “that’s so nice.”

  “I won’t really have to work, but what else is there to do! I’m fifty-six years old, and I’m not ready to settle into my knitting.”

  “What about the foundation?” Catherine asked. “Couldn’t you work there?”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine it,” Fleck said, crinkling up her nose. “Me, in an office! I’ve never been anything but a personal secretary! I’d have to wear matching outfits and all, wouldn’t I? No, that would never do.” It was hard to imagine Fleck in pumps and a St. Laurie suit. Even for the funeral, her clothes were strangely haphazard. A straight black wool dress, probably from the early sixties, that had a number of unsightly snags. The ever-faithful Birkenstocks, presumably her only footwear, though there was a dusting of snow on the ground that made them inappropriate. And a huge tan trench coat, that hadn’t been cleaned or pressed in a while, and couldn’t possibly be keeping her warm. With a cigar, she would have made a
good Columbo.

  She invited us in for cakes and tea. There was quite an assortment of baked goods, sent by the neighborhood women, from the best patisseries in the Village. They were spread out over the kitchen counter, which was quite long, all unopened.

  “I suppose I should do up a proper tea,” said Fleck, halfheartedly, but we made her sit while we boiled water and set out some pastries. She was unaccustomed to being waited on, she said, but she let us do it anyway.

  “I was with her such a long time,” Fleck said sadly, nibbling at the edge of a cookie. “Came when Miss Stern was taken ill, and they needed help. I was just in my early thirties then, so long ago. She brought me from England, where I’d worked for the Viscount, her brother. She was my family here, really, like my mum.” She looked helplessly around the kitchen, a large, well-equipped one. “What am I going to do here, all by myself?”

  “You could sell it, and make a nice sum of money,” I suggested. “Houses around here cost a fortune.”

  “Yes, and buy a smaller place,” Catherine chimed in. “One where you wouldn’t feel so alone.”

  “I’d have to get rid of all these things, too,” she said wearily. “I was thinking of living downstairs and renting out the top. That would give me some income, too. But then you have to find renters, and who knows who you’ll get stuck with?”

  Catherine and I looked at each other over our teacups. My eyes were cautious, hers were eager.

  “Susan and I are looking for a place,” Catherine announced. I cleared my throat. Did we really want to live where Elinor Devere had died? Wasn’t I haunted enough already? “If you go that route, we might be interested. We want to be downtown.”

  Fleck was visibly relieved. She took a big bite of almond cookie. “Well, yes, I’ll keep it in mind.”

  After tea, she showed us to the office upstairs where the odds and ends of Elinor’s personal mementos were kept. There wasn’t much, mostly letters from friends and family in England, some souvenir items, a shoebox full of loose snapshots in no particular order. Fleck hadn’t been through any of it and hoped that I would do that work for her.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Fleck said, mysteriously disappearing into another room and reappearing with something clenched in her hand.

  “This,” she said, holding out the marcasite pin that had belonged to Lucy. “She said you’d want this.”

  • • •

  I have been toying with this idea for a while now. I think people see things more clearly when they’re dying, that the act of leaving life helps them see the real meanings behind it. I believe this is what happened with Elinor Devere and why she had a change of heart about me. Maybe in her final moments she realized that her life would essentially be lost unless she made an effort to hand it over to someone, to have someone remember her. And perhaps not judging her life important enough to be of interest to a library or archive, she decided I was better than nothing. For this sudden burst of recognition, I have been able to forgive her her refusal to continue talking to me.

  The letters from family and friends were interesting as documents of World War I. They were mostly patriotic drivel from the family in the Mother Country to their girl “doing her bit” in France. After reading them, I was sorry I’d never gotten to talk to her about the war, which was not the glorious crusade her parents believed it to be. What was it like for a lesbian? What was it like for a woman? What was it like for a human being? But I’d been too intent on one narrow line of questioning.

  Elinor was not a writer, unfortunately, and there were no journals or stories to give glimpses of the past. Sarah’s letters and manuscripts had all been sent, as Roz at the Archives had told us, to NYU, where they were still uncatalogued. Elinor had cherished only a few items: a souvenir program from The Captive, the lesbian play she’d told us about; a menu from a restaurant in the Village (some romantic connection, maybe?); articles by Sarah, most of which I’d seen in Xerox form earlier, including a book review from The Nation. It was all rather interesting and unhelpful for my particular needs.

  There were many photographs of Elinor and Sarah alone; most seemed to be after the twenties, because of their clothing and the decidedly middle-aged look about both of them. There were only three of The Gang, quite a contrast from Lucy’s collection. One was a duplicate of a photo I had of all of them in Montauk; one was of the four in a slightly different pose, taken just seconds before or after the other. In the last, they’d switched positions: Lucy stood on the far right, next to Elinor, with Sarah next, Harriet’s arm around her waist. Harriet was smiling at her, in an unmistakably flirtatious fashion. Why would Elinor save such a picture? Possibly, I thought, to dispel the image of Harriet that Lucy put forth, because Elinor thought she knew the real Harriet. Did she?

  “Hold still now, ladies,” said I, the photographer, as they shifted their positions, just for a change.

  “We’re always like this—Lucy, Harriet, Elinor, Sarah. Let’s switch,” Harriet suggested, choosing her spot at the end of the line and pulling Sarah toward her. “Now they won’t know who’s a couple,” she giggled.

  “Who won’t know?” I asked, as I steadied the camera.

  “Why, posterity, of course,” she answered. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I plan to be known.” She smiled at Sarah and poked her playfully, but Sarah concentrated on the pose.

  “Harriet, behave,” she chastised her as the shutter clicked. And suddenly I was only holding a photograph of them, not taking one.

  • • •

  The photograph sent me back to Lucy’s journal. I reread the installments of romantic bliss, about Lucy and Harriet’s first meetings, to buoy myself. But further on, past the writing essays, I found other entries, ones I could have sworn hadn’t been there before, and as I read them I grew sad and disillusioned. It felt like someone had ripped my fantasy cleanly in half. Was there no perfect love? Did most romances crumble? How long did Catherine and I have left? We’d already weathered a bad period, but would we hold up in the next storm?

  I fell asleep reading and rereading, and as she liked to do, Lucy came and tapped me gently to wake up.

  “Why?” I asked her. “Why did you stand for it?”

  “Why does Catherine stand for your antics?” she smiled. “Imagine, a grown woman seeing ghosts! Because she loves you, I dare say. And why do you put up with her bullying? Because you have something together other people can’t see, don’t want to see. Harriet gave me more than you could ever know, something others could never know.” She looked me straight in the eye, something she hadn’t done before. She always seemed to be looking off or past me, and I had guessed that that’s what ghosts did. “That’s what you feel from us. And that’s what you have to communicate. What no one ever saw or knew.”

  “That,” I smiled broadly, “is what I’ve felt all along! Why the facts didn’t matter so much to me! It’s something else, something . . . deeper,” but as I finished, she had already evaporated into the shadows at the foot of the bed. I picked up the journal and began reading again.

  28

  October, 1930

  The first time Harriet was unfaithful to me, I felt it like a hard knot in my throat. I knew before she ever told me. She went away to Provincetown for three weeks to star in a wretched play by the same man who wrote Miss Morley. You think someone would have stopped him after that fiasco, but he kept on writing plays and Harriet kept starring in them. It was August of 1920, and it was dreadfully hot in New York, but I only stayed in Provincetown with her for two days. We were having some difficulties with our finances, because we’d taken a bigger, more expensive apartment on Eighty-fifth Street, and I was making some extra money by writing stories and tutoring a dull rich girl. Harriet was making almost no money acting, and was spending it as quickly as she made it, so the burden of fiscal responsibility had fallen to me. I was seven years older than Harriet and expected to be more mature in all things, especially money matters.

  So I left her in
Provincetown, but not without noticing her rapport with one of her fellow actresses, Amelia Wingate, equally young, equally flirtatious, equally irresponsible. Watching them giggle together, I felt much older than thirty. I was almost relieved to go back to New York, to look up old acquaintances and friends I’d been neglecting since Harriet and I had set up housekeeping together. I was especially happy to renew my relationship with Sarah Stern, whom I’d met at Heterodoxy, and who was making a name for herself in certain downtown circles for writing she was doing on women and labor. I had not seen her much since I had wandered away from Heterodoxy, two years before, when Harriet and I became so deeply involved.

  I invited her to lunch at Polly Halliday’s, which was near her apartment and affordable to both of us (and, coincidentally, where Heterodoxy met). Sarah, I knew, was struggling, just getting by on articles she wrote for The Nation, and with a part-time research position for an economics professor at New York University. She could have been teaching herself, in fact, should have been, because she was brilliant and fascinating and full of insights into the history of the labor movement. But she was from a poor background, with no higher education, and she came by all her knowledge of the labor movement first hand. She worked for several years at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, till the fire there claimed the lives of several of her friends, including her companion at that time, an immigrant woman named Rachel Mikulsky. That incident, Sarah said, changed her life, and she has been active in different causes since that time. First it was labor, then that led her into the suffrage movement. The war in Europe made her a peace advocate. She tied all these strains together in a book she published called An Economic History of American Women.

  She had some financial support also from Elinor Devere, her companion. Elinor was British, from a wealthy titled family. She had paid her way into the Volunteer Ambulance Corps during the war as a service to her country. She was one of the most dignified women I’d ever met, yet she was unpretentious about the station she had held in British society. She once showed me pictures of herself in France, during the war. One was taken clowning with a young man whom I had seen before. I asked his name.