by Amanda Cross
Simon Pearlstine had been clever to offer it to her, given his hopes, for the book fairly cried out for more about Gabrielle. Where, Hansford seemed constantly to ask, had Foxx got his knowledge of female emotion and desire? Had he not turned to Gabrielle for help, advice, perhaps even for actual written descriptions? Hansford referred, not very obliquely, to the way in which Colette’s husband had locked her in a room and forced her to write out the accounts of her school days, including her sexual adventures, explorations, and experiments. Other men had attempted to portray a woman’s psyche: Lawrence certainly, and Joyce of course in the un-corseted and, for their time, shocking thoughts of Molly Bloom as she lay in bed, menstruated, masturbated, recalled her conquests, and assiduously avoided (as women do when thinking?) all punctuation and established syntax. True, Dorothy Richardson had done something of the sort: written the thoughts of a woman in a form that the male establishment had found hardly enticing, and of which Graham Greene had complained that the dreary Miriam had finally lost her virginity on page four hundred and something, perhaps to his mind her most notable achievement, a judgment with which Hansford appeared to agree and to which Kate emphatically objected. But Emmanuel Foxx had certainly outdone them all: devoted an entire book, linguistically revolutionary, exquisitely crafted, to the life and thoughts and passions of a woman. He had guessed, Hansford declared, that man’s fascination and obsession with woman, as well as his terror of her newly empowered voice, desires, and ambitions, would reveal themselves as to the very heart of modernism. And so, in time, they had. But what had Gabrielle to do with all this, besides bearing his child, loving him, and giving him her life? Did she prepare more than his food and his laundry? That was the haunting question, Hansford declared.
Well, Kate asked herself, did she? The book was not long; even perhaps in intent if not in size, a coffee-table book. It had been cleverly stretched out to disguise the sparsity of text, Kate, reading into the night, was able to finish it. All the old facts were there, the old facts and the new question about Gabrielle’s part in the creation of Ariadne.
But was there any real reason to ask it? The only answer was, in its turn, another question: how had Gabrielle lived her life, and what, besides her love for Emmanuel Foxx, had kept her going? She must have been aware (Hansford said as much) that she was considered an appendage to her husband, a necessary but regrettable part of his life and work. Dorinda Goddard Nicholson had told Hansford that Hilda had not spoken much of Gabrielle, nor had her husband, Gabrielle’s son, Emile.
One knew in the end remarkably little about Gabrielle. Or did one? Perhaps Hansford, like earlier biographers, had simply not searched with sufficient rigor. Kate bethought herself, laughing, of John le Carré, in whose books she delighted. Now, if one could only get John le Carré’s British secret service to do the groundwork for a biography. In five days, they could discover all there was to know about a person’s past, present, and likely future: they tapped telephones, undertook interviews on phony excuses, learned all a person’s haunts, habits, what and where they drank, ate, made love, hung out, and worked. Of course, the subject of the secret service’s remarkable endeavors was alive and in a position to spy for England. Still, they resurrected the past with an efficiency any biographer might envy. Was it only the secret service that had the money and the employees to undertake such horrible probing? Many said J. Edgar Hoover had turned these investigative powers onto Martin Luther King and others he thought dangerous to America’s ideas of white supremacy and anticommunism. Kate had read somewhere that tapping telephones was child’s play in the current world; England’s were tapped by the government as a matter of course, she had been informed. But, what had this to do with poor Gabrielle?
Kate, my dear, she said to herself, you are wandering off into your detective mode. But wasn’t that the point of remembering le Carré? No, it wasn’t. The point was that detectives are not biographers, and secret services least of all. In fact, as she thought about it, the point of le Carré’s excellent books was precisely that the more you knew people, the less you knew them. Tapping telephones, in the end, might give you information, but it did not give you understanding. Kate smiled. Thanks be for the unpredictabilities of human nature. It was not that the likes of Hoover and the British secret service lacked for answers; what they lacked was the right questions.
Which a biographer might ask? Which she, Kate Fansler, might ask? Kate had a totally indefensible belief in destiny, providence, the wisdom of chance. Such a belief could scarcely be expressed, let alone defended. But wasn’t Simon Pearlstine’s offer just the sort of opportunity that earlier, simpler times and people attributed to divine benevolence! No, she could have no part of divine benevolence; yet opportunities lost, tides not taken on the rise, chances declined, could certainly add up to a life lived rather drearily on one track and in the path of safety and sullen self-satisfaction. Wasn’t that, after all, why her vocation of amateur detective had been so appealing? Had she ever sought a case in her life? No, she had not. They had come to her, and she had pursued them because when you are called you must answer, or, as with some of le Carré’s heroes, adamantly refuse. But you could not wobble in indecision and laxity. End of lecture.
All of Kate’s “cases” had called upon, if not exactly needed, her literary skills honed in the world of academic criticism and scholarship. She attracted those cases which called for her particular talents, or which seemed to. That was why she was not, all other more obvious reasons apart, a private investigator rather than a professor of literature. One could hardly hang out a shingle inviting only those cases with literary ramifications.
Gabrielle Foxx. What had her maiden name been? Kate consulted the index of Hansford’s book: Howard. Gabrielle Howard Foxx. Born 1889; ran off to Paris with Emmanuel, 1905. Only child, Emile, born 1906. Emile married to Hilda in 1925. Grandchild Nellie born 1926. Emmanuel died in 1942. Emile presumed dead, 1944. Gabrielle moved back to England in 1950. Died in 1959.
Kate listed these dates, extracted with some difficulty from Hansford’s biography: he had not provided a chronology except of Foxx’s publications. Did these dates constitute a life? They would have long been thought properly to constitute a female life, certainly in the days when a woman’s name was printed in the newspapers at her birth, marriage, death, and never else. Why was Gabrielle even possible as the subject of a biography? Because she had run off with and lived with and perhaps inspired a famous writer, one of the pillars of high modernism?
Kate turned back to the picture, to the face looking out the window, away from the figure in the thronelike chair. Well, suppose one of those Goddards or Nellie Foxx had hired her to find out all there was to be found out about Gabrielle? Would she take it as a case? Probably. Would she take it as a literary enterprise encompassing the work of many years? That was less likely.
Which was where, in fact, Kate’s thoughts remained for one of the two weeks before her next meeting with Simon Pearlstine.
At the start of the second week, when the whole idea of a biography of Gabrielle had receded to the back of Kate’s mind and, she was inclined to believe, the realm of the unlikely, she received an envelope from Simon Pearlstine, delivered by messenger. It was a large brown envelope, containing a short manuscript and a covering letter. Pearlstine had written:
Dear Kate (if I may):
Whether or not you agree to do the biography of Gabrielle—and of course I hope and pray that you will agree—I have decided to trust you with the enclosed. It is a most intriguing (I find) account by Anne Gringold of her life with the Goddards. She was, as you will discover, also about the last person to see Gabrielle in her proper self, before her stroke or whatever it was.
I shall save for our next meeting (same time, same place one week hence) an explanation of how this came into my hands. Anne needed money, that is the long and short of it, and gave it to someone who trusted me to deal fairly with it. And so I trust you with
it now. I hope, of course, that it will entice you to undertake the biography. If these pages and I fail, I know I can trust you to keep their contents secret and to return them to me without showing them to anyone else. You see what confidence I have in you.
Until next week,
Simon
Typed by himself.
Kate turned to the enclosed manuscript, glancing at its first phrase: “ ‘He is the greatest writer of his time,’ Dorinda said . . .” She read through to the end without stopping.
Simon was waiting for Kate when she arrived. “A vodka martini?” he asked.
“Not today,” Kate said. “Today I’m with you all the way, designer water, salad, coffee—not decaffeinated, so I guess it’s not all the way. Some things I can’t give up, even for Gabrielle.”
“I trust that’s a good sign,” Simon said, before giving the order to the waiter.
“Well, if I give up the Beaune, it probably is,” Kate said. “But in fact, I drink only at frivolous lunches, and at all dinners. How did you come upon that Anne Gringold manuscript?”
“A friend of a friend of a friend. Hush, hush, of course. Except to say that Anne needed money, this was her most salable item, but she wanted it to fall only into good hands: those you see before me.”
“And that’s what inspired you to ask me to do the biography?”
“I should have been inspired to ask you in any case; you came to me as an inspiration all on your own. But I do admit to hoping that Anne’s tale would swing the odds in my favor.”
“You paid her for it, adequately, generously?”
“Yes, my dear Kate Fansler, I did. And offered her a further fee if it were used in a biography. If it isn’t used, she’ll be free to sell it on the open market. Meanwhile I offered and she gratefully received a handsome price, handsome I do assure you.”
“In the same class of handsome as my proposed advance.”
“A woman of perspicacity.”
“You do realize that I have never written a book for what I believe is called the trade market? All my scholarly and critical endeavors have been published by university presses. Are you sure I shall be readable enough to sell?”
“All my editorial instincts point to that conclusion.”
“Exciting as Anne Gringold’s account is, it tells us relatively little about Gabrielle. Only that she has Gabrielle’s papers. One must assume, if she has agreed to publication, that she wants someone to pursue them. But if found, won’t they in fact belong to Nellie as Gabrielle’s heir?”
“No. I was able to determine that. After all, I don’t want a lawsuit on our hands. Gabrielle made out a codicil to her will just before Anne came to see her. It left her papers absolutely to Anne Gringold, stating only that in the event that they were ever sold for a sum of money, half of that sum would go to Nellie or her heirs, the other half to remain with Anne.”
“It certainly does arouse one’s detective instincts.”
“So I hoped; a detective and a scholar, to say nothing of a published author of remarkably readable prose. Dare I hope, dare I suspect, Kate Fansler, that you are caught? That I may draw up a contract?”
“I don’t even have an agent.”
“You don’t need one. But lest you think I am trying to pull the wool over your eyes, let me hasten to say that I suggest you show the contract to your lawyer husband. If he doesn’t feel competent in publishing matters, he must know someone who does.”
“Are you trying to make me say yes at this very moment?”
“I am, I am. Shall we each have a vodka martini?”
“Make it a half-bottle of Beaune.”
Simon signaled to the waiter and gave the order. They sat in silence while the wine steward fetched the bottle, ordered the glasses, poured out the first taste.
“We’ll both taste it,” Simon said. And he held up his glass with only a bit of the crimson magic in the bottom.
“To Gabrielle,” he said.
“Or,” Kate responded, raising her glass in turn, “to this ship and all who sail in her, as John le Carré would say.”
“Maybe I should have tried to get him to write the biography,” Simon said, laughing.
“Too late; you’ve got me,” Kate Fansler said.
PART TWO
Chapter Two
Anne Gringold’s Memoir
“He is the greatest writer of his time,” Dorinda said, in that tone children use when quoting established parental opinion. “Perhaps,” she added, “of any time. And he is a relation of ours.”
“By marriage,” I pointed out. This was not particularly generous of me. Dorinda had been so endowed by life with all the elements of charm and wealth that her claim to the greatest writer seemed, at the least, to be gilding the lily. (This last was a phrase of my mother’s whose meaning I had discerned through use rather than analysis of its metaphor or knowledge of its source.)
“His grandchild is certainly our relation,” Dorinda said, closing, as was her invariable habit, the discussion. Since the great writer’s son had married Dorinda’s father’s sister, no argument was possible. An only child like me, she now had a cousin her age with a romantic and war-torn past, due to appear out of the blue (of the ocean, not the sky) and add to Dorinda’s life more romance, a commodity of which, in my opinion, she already had an unfair share. The only overwhelming disappointment, which loyalty to my sex forbade my pointing out even though it might have punctured a little Dorinda’s boasts, was that the grandchild was a girl. A boy, in this case as, I was certain, in all cases, was what had been longed for. Still, this girl bore the magic name and might even, like Margaret Mead, a hero of mine, decline to change it upon marriage or, even more daringly, decline to marry. At that point, the car drove up, the chauffeur honked and we rushed out to be driven to the beach club and our ocean games.
This memory, from the time just before America entered into World War II, returns to me like a flashback from the sort of movie they used to make when I was young. Except that those flashbacks were extended, and full of portent. My memories, which have seized me more often and more unexpectedly in recent years, are like a photograph flashed on the wall. I was an ardent photographer in those young days and for many years thereafter. I had an excellent camera, thanks again to Dorinda and her family, and Dorinda had taught me how to flash pictures, not yet in color, on the wall through a large projector. I see us, therefore, sitting on the huge porch of her summer home on the Jersey shore, swinging our rockers violently backward, awaiting our ride to the beach. The conversation is not in the picture, not even (in my memory) in balloons above our heads, as though we were cartoon figures. Rather, the language is the scene; is what the scene evokes, is that remembered moment. A movie from a later time, called Hiroshima, Mon Amour, was, in my opinion, the last to capture memory properly. Movies today are all crosscuts and violent effects, screams, movements. Memories (as opposed to traumas, or repressed scenes) are still; only the words speak. But, in my experience at least, they are always insignificant memories that have remained for no discernible reason, ready to be evoked by a chance occurrence or remark. (Once, when Dorinda and I were in the car with her parents, the chauffeur driving, Dorinda and I on the jump seats, a fly buzzed about us in the summer heat. “And I thought,” Dorinda told me later, “that I would never remember that fly and, of course having said that, will always remember it.” I never thought to ask her when we met again, both well into middle age, if she had remembered it. But I remembered for her, after all.)
The year when Dorinda’s cousin arrived was 1941. We would all three be together at the end of that year, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. I remember that we were in Dorinda’s room, and her mother, who had been listening to the Philharmonic concert on the radio, came in to tell us the concert had been interrupted with the news. Every adult I knew at that time, if home on Sunday, listened to the Philharmonic: my moth
er, my aunts, the parents of my and Dorinda’s schoolmates. Such concerts seemed to me oddly appropriate as the channel for the news that we were at war. Dorinda, her cousin Nellie, and I settled into the life of wartime America. We all rejoiced that Nellie had been plucked from the disaster that was Europe. I knew of others similarly plucked, who turned up as guests in the elegant homes where my mother worked. But they were different, part of my secret life with my mother, resented, overtly scorned and snubbed.
“Why do they criticize everything here,” I asked my mother. “Why aren’t they grateful? Why do they always talk about how much better everything was in Germany? If it was so much better, why didn’t they stay there?”
I did not then know mine was a widespread and stupid question; what immigrant or refugee does not think of home? I suspect I hated them because they were Jews and allowed me the regrettable comfort a poor child might find in Jew-hating. It was altogether a different matter for Dorinda, whose family, an integral part of what came to be known as “Our Crowd,” were friends with Guggenheims and Warburgs, to be Jewish. They were as elegant as Episcopalians and almost indistinguishable. Besides, Dorinda’s mother was a gentile who used to take us to midnight mass at her Lutheran church. I forgave myself my anti-Semitism by the ridiculous canard that some of my best friends were Jews. My mother supported me in this neat and, as it turned out, universal dismissal of the Jewish question. She said that nobody bothered honorable people; I suppose she meant rich. Years later, when I read a book by Paule Marshall called Brown Girl, Brownstones in which she talks of her mother’s cleaning “Jew floors,” I felt ashamed, and with less excuse than Paule Marshall had. She was black, and had not known Dorinda and her family.
The greatest writer of his time was named Foxx; Emmanuel Foxx. I did not remember having heard of him when Dorinda broke the news of his granddaughter’s coming, but my mother had a first edition of his most famous novel among her books when she died, and she had written in it the date of its acquisition; she must at least have mentioned him to me at an earlier time. I suspect that, as with many declared masterpieces, his novel was ardently read by scholars and skimmed or ignored by those intelligent ones, few enough in every country, who, uninstructed, read books constantly and eagerly. Unlike Virginia Woolf, but like James Joyce or Marcel Proust, he was more an academic’s than a reader’s passion. Perhaps he was nearer to Proust than Joyce. Certainly he stood, as I now understand, together with these two and T. S. Eliot, at the center of modernism as it was conceived in academic departments and learned books and articles. Unlike Joyce or Proust, however, his central character was a woman. With an intensity, attention to detail, and experimentation with language that was dumbfounding in its originality and inventiveness, Foxx had written a year in the life of a woman that followed, with dogged persistence and great ingenuity, her every thought and passion. She was a woman seen through the eyes of a man looking through her eyes, and she set the scholars many a profound challenge.