by Amanda Cross
The story of Dorinda’s birth is easily enough told. She was conceived after many months of despair and born after an atrocious labor. Her father, Sig, finally shown the large, bruised female infant, snorted and said that she looked like a Jewish comedian. I knew this, because he had often told Dorinda who had told me. Yet I imagine him, with his careless ways, worrying at that very moment about his cherished sister Hilda, pregnant in France.
Eleanor had been Sig’s secretary; perhaps he married her because she was docile, efficient, and orderly; perhaps because she would not sleep with him otherwise. Sig was so attractive that a woman refusing him was no doubt a novelty. Eleanor told me, in later years, that although the Goddards insisted as a matter of course that she hire a nursemaid for Dorinda, she used to follow the nurse along the streets at a discreet distance to make sure her child was safe. Occasionally, she would insist on taking Dorinda, in her elegant pram, out on her own. It was as though, she later told me, Dorinda knew she had someone controllable in charge. She would hold her breath in anger at whatever direction Eleanor was taking, and turn bluer and bluer before the eyes of her horrified mother, until Eleanor gave in and went where Dorinda wanted to go. Eleanor assumed, I don’t know on what evidence, that the nurses never had this problem.
When the nurse had become a governess, certainly later still when I first knew Dorinda, Eleanor had learned to wear her robes of ladyhood more naturally. She was, in fact, a natural lady, but it took her some years to trust herself and her authority, at least with her servants and in the Goddard circle. I don’t think she ever believed herself to have any control over Dorinda. She would tell me stories of Dorinda’s triumph, rather as though this proved not so much her own falterings as Dorinda’s spirit. She must have been the most astonished of us all when Dorinda suddenly turned conventional. It was almost as though her mother’s genes suddenly sprang into action twenty years later.
In Europe, meanwhile, Hilda wore her beautiful clothes while moving with infinite grace and wealth in artistic circles. There were nightclubs, of course, and the gay life between the wars. Somehow, although I can picture everything else about the Goddards’ life before I came into it, my imagination refuses to cross the ocean. I know only what Eleanor, Dorinda, Nellie, and the later biographies of Emmanuel Foxx told me—that Hilda, early into her European career, met Emmanuel Foxx and became, as had so many women, his slave. Hilda, who could not pick up her own underwear or scrawl letters on her own behalf, typed manuscripts for Foxx and helped him out in numerous ways, some costing only money, but others effort, tedium, and even pain.
Gabrielle, Emmanuel’s wife, loathed Hilda from the first; more accurately, I suppose, she feared her: her beauty, her money, her fascination for Emmanuel. But in the end Emmanuel proved resistant to Hilda’s charms, if not to her money or efforts. So she turned her brilliance upon Emmanuel and Gabrielle’s twenty-year-old son, Emile. She was older than he, and far more practiced at the flirtation game. He had been dragged around Europe after his father, who was always in search of better conditions, better ways to pay the rent, more attentive women and patrons. Dorinda told me before Nellie came that Nellie, like her father, spoke four languages, all of them with a special precision that reveals the language as not one’s own. Emile and Nellie were excellent linguists with no mother tongue. Nellie came to America and the Goddards so eagerly, not only because of the war, but because here was a place to which she might, at least for a few years, belong.
Shortly after Hilda and Emile started their affair, people began referring to him as a gigolo. I suppose it was hard not to. In all the surviving photographs he stands with Hilda in a group, she at the center, he on the edge looking sulky and rather out of place. But she must have fascinated him with her beauty, her practiced arts of wiliness, her wealth, and her carelessness about the cost of anything. When she became pregnant, Emmanuel Foxx insisted that they marry; he wanted an heir, someone to carry on his name. Everyone assumed, including Emmanuel himself, that he wanted a male heir, but when Nellie was born he announced that, since the protagonist of his famous novel was a woman, it was only right that his heir be a woman also. She was named after the character in his great novel, but was always called Nellie by everyone who knew her.
Once Hilda had tired of posing for beautiful pictures with the newborn baby, she turned Nellie over to nurses. But Gabrielle, Emmanuel’s wife, intervened. She took over her grandchild, an act of which Emmanuel heartily approved, and so Nellie lived with them for the most part, as did her father in the late thirties once he had tired of Hilda and his role as husband to a still wildly flirtatious woman. (Peggy Guggenheim was reputed to have insisted that her lovers try all the positions pictured on the walls of some building in Pompeii where women were not allowed to enter but into which Peggy Guggenheim had bribed her way. Whether this is true or not, it was Hilda’s boast also. Doubtless new lovers were as essential to this frantic game as were new positions.) But although Nellie lived with her grandparents and her father, it was to her mother’s family she gladly, eagerly came when she got the chance. Emmanuel wanted her safe; Emile had taken to drinking so constantly that his opinion was neither sought nor given. What Gabrielle thought no one asked or perhaps cared. Nellie at least knew that her grandmother would miss her, and used to write her letters in which she tried to sound loving, but could scarcely conceal how good a time she was having, how happy she was to be in America with the Goddards, Dorinda, and me.
When I arrived in London later that year after meeting Eleanor in the store, I wondered if Gabrielle would remember me as the third girl in Nellie’s letters. I had thought of Gabrielle so often over the years, had heard so much of her from Nellie and from the Goddards, that I felt we could meet as old acquaintances. If, of course, she was not too old to find a place for me among her sad memories.
Upon Emmanuel Foxx’s death, not long after Nellie’s departure for the States, Gabrielle dropped into obscurity. Literary admirers and adorers put up with wives if they must as part of the price of the noble man’s presence. But without the great author, a wife, unless she is literary executor and a tight guarder of the reputation and literary leavings, like the widow of T. S. Eliot, is as unregarded as his merest belongings, more likely, indeed, considered fit only as rummage.
As always, it was the Goddards who came to the rescue. They sent Gabrielle a monthly check which they hoped but hardly dared expect would not be spent largely on Emile’s alcoholic needs. And then, quite suddenly, Emile disappeared during the war, picked up, it was suspected, by the Nazis who were by this time ruling Paris. There was some hope that he had pulled himself together, stopped drinking, joined the Resistance and either gone into hiding or been killed heroically in some action against the Germans. But no one could find out anything about him. Emile’s disappearance was, perhaps, the last straw for Gabrielle. She was alive; money reached her. This was all the Goddards were able to establish during the war.
After the liberation of Prance, Sig Goddard managed to learn that Gabrielle still lived in a part of the old Foxx apartment. She had been cared for by several gallant women who had considered Emmanuel Foxx the great writer of his time, but had few illusions about his character or his thought for the needs of his wife should she survive him. Genius makes its own rules, they admitted that, but others must look out for the nonliterary leavings of his genius. And, most moving of all, particularly, as Sig Goddard said in his usual sardonic manner, given the parsimony and penny-pinching of the French, a restaurant owner whose restaurant the Foxx family had often dined in before the war offered Gabrielle a free meal every day. Eleanor mentioned to me at our meeting that she had, characteristically, thanked the man and sent him a suitable gift.
There had been a real effort made to bring Gabrielle over for Dorinda’s wedding. Nellie had telegraphed to London pleading with her to come. But she said she was too old, that Nellie must represent her. I think we all knew then that Nellie ought to go to London to see
her grandmother.
It was a huge wedding, at the Harmonie Club, with Nellie and me as bridesmaids. My mother was also invited, and I was in a secret panic that she would do or say something to disgrace me, but in fact she behaved perfectly correctly, and even seemed to enjoy herself My mother, whom I had never thought of as a dancer—the very last skill in the world one would expect of her—having been asked to waltz by some man as a kind gesture, proved herself so graceful and gay that she danced all during the wedding and allowed me, when in my embarrassment and trepidation I dared to look at her, to see what she might have been if some gaiety had been allowed or available in her life.
Her dancing that way shocked me for another, secret reason. I had always been, in private, a wild dancer, whirling around the room, my head full of fantasies, my body moving in a way no ballroom dancing could ever permit. Years later, when the young began dancing opposite one another, but each moving in his or her own way, I recognized the kind of social dancing that I might have been good at. But I could never follow a man in dancing; I always wanted to move faster, to go at my own pace. Oddly enough, as it seemed then but as I should have perceived as an omen, Dorinda had no trouble with ballroom dancing, moving in her partner’s arms as though his leading her was all she wanted of life. I never mentioned my private wild dancing to my mother; I only danced when alone, with a record on and no one to see or hear me. Some time ago I stopped, and have never taken up dancing again. Perhaps walking, to which I am addicted, took its place, perhaps the fantasies that accompanied my dancing receded with the years. At Dorinda’s wedding, I danced a few obligatory rounds, and then sat at the table drinking champagne and trying not to watch my mother, unable not to watch her.
The Harmonie Club, where the wedding was held, was and probably still is—I have never taken the time to notice—at 60th Street off Fifth Avenue. It was a club for wealthy Jews who were not accepted at the usual clubs suitable to their social class. The club, I remember Dorinda telling me, took only German Jews, never Eastern European, and was very strict in its membership standards. Dorinda, dressed in a gorgeous bridal gown, walked down the aisle on her father’s arm as though there had never been a gray Ford coupe or the men of her college years, with Nellie and me right behind her in matching pale-blue gowns paid for, needless to say, by the Goddards.
The groom waited in full regalia with his equally boring best man and claimed her the way they did in the movies of our childhood, but neither Nellie nor I was fooled. He hated us, and Dorinda’s separation from us began with her wedding. But, as it happened, Nellie was off to London to visit her grandmother after Dorinda’s wedding, a trip to London for which the Goddards paid, and I was to begin work as an assistant editor, really a secretary, in the publishing business, a job found for me, needless again to say, by the Goddards.
Dorinda walked down the aisle into the arms of her stuffy surgeon-to-be and out of the intimacy Nellie and I had offered her for the better part of our lives.
As I marched down the aisle behind Dorinda I revolved the ring on my right hand as a kind of talisman, signifying all that the Goddards and Dorinda had meant to me. It was—it still is—a Jensen ring, from the old days when the Jensen store was on Fifth Avenue and sold what I thought the most beautiful jewelry in the world. For my sixteenth birthday, the birthday after the night with the Capehart, the night I met Len, Dorinda and her mother went with me to buy me a ring. I chose the same ring Dorinda already had; the Jensen models were famous, and available year after year. The silver in the ring was carved with leaves, and the stone was a moonstone; I had always admired Dorinda’s, had always longed for just that ring. I remember, though I politely pretended not to hear, that it cost thirty-five dollars, a huge sum then, almost unbelievable now. I left the store with the ring, vowing never to remove it; indeed, I have not removed it for long. It contained, so I fancied, all of our youth, for I had read some such phrase in a novel.
So I turned the ring on my finger walking down the aisle at Dorinda’s wedding, perhaps to distract me from the farce in which I was taking part; I suddenly remembered also one of the first nights I spent with Dorinda in New York, after my first summer with her. The Goddards had taken us all in a taxi to Rumpelmayer’s, and while we were ordering our sodas, a taxi driver came up, led by the manager, to say he had found my purse in his cab after he had left us off. I claimed, ashamed and guilty, the brown cloth bag he held out, first to Dorinda, then to me. I remember Mr. Goddard reaching into his pocket for some money with which to tip the driver. I knew my purse, which was an old one of my mother’s, was worth less than the tip.
And there was another memory, too, which followed that one. It was of Dorinda’s birthday party, that first summer. All the daughters of the families at the shore were invited. And each of us found, at our places when we finally sat down for dinner, a pencil box with our names in gold on the cover. When the box was opened, there was a row of pencils, each with a name. My box had my name. The pencils had my name. I kept the pencils and the box for years. It was Eleanor, of course, who had planned it all, who had included me.
It was Eleanor I would be repaying by doing my task in London well. Or, the realist in me added, by doing it at all.
My trip to London was hardly as glamorous as it sounded. I was being sent to assist a man who had been my boss in New York, but who had moved to London in the course of marital upheavals that were the riveting subject of gossip then, and about which I remember nothing. He had at first been considering moving to Paris to set up a French publishing office but, to my infinite relief, he had chosen London instead.
By the time I joined him there, my publishing career had already declared itself as in the business, not the literary or editorial, end. I was very good at figures, very efficient and quick, just like my mother, though such a thought would hardly have occurred to me. I housekept for publishers instead of for Our Crowd and the other rich. There was, I suppose I now see, very little difference.
Paris has never held any particular delights for me. I recognize the amazement such a statement evokes, but I am one of those who seems somehow never to have been part of the convictions of a generation or culture. I remember once reading about Irwin Edman, who had been young in the twenties, and he said his youth had been nothing like the flaming years he always read about. True, he was a philosopher, and perhaps had not found Scott Fitzgerald a spokesman for his desires or ambitions.
I have never been much of a traveler, and though I have loved cities, Paris is not a city, or so it seemed to me, for a lonely woman looking for streets in which to walk and bookstores (replete, of course, with books old and new in the English language) in which to browse. London is such a city; so was New York in those days. In Paris, one seemed always to be on the outside. Nor, I suspected, would that change if I went there on business; people might have to talk to me in a businesslike way, answer my questions, discuss relevant matters, but I doubted that such would prove to be the case. I spoke French, but with a heavy American accent. The whole language of sexuality, so essential to French interchanges of all sorts, was unknown to me, nor did I honor it. I had found the French, during my one visit there a few years before, to be operating, in their attitudes toward money, sex, intellectual (as opposed to practical) ideas, clothes, and food, on a plane altogether too elevated for me. I see now that it was not my accent alone which ostracized me; it was also my total indifference to the many signs I missed, the many gestures I scorned. Blunt people have never recommended themselves to the French. When, later, I read the books of Nancy Mitford, I understood why I was destined always to be desolate in France. I enjoyed her writings, but knew that in her world, I would have been one of the clumsy ones caricatured in her novels.
I had even been in love the time I had spent in Paris, had met Len there again, had made that kind of young, frantic love, interrupted only by meals and idyllic walks under the chestnut trees. We loved, we walked entwined, but we did not admire the
chestnut trees, pollarded and, in our view, tortured. The weather seemed to us gray, wet, and dark. We found the waiters supercilious and unkind. Frenchmen at nearby tables, overhearing us, insisted on telling us what was the matter with America. I was very glad my adulterous boss had decided on London, and doubly grateful when I was enabled, thereby, to do a favor for Eleanor and to enter, once more, into the affairs of her fascinating family, the family into which she had, perhaps so unhappily, married.
It was unclear that Gabrielle’s marriage had been any easier than Eleanor’s to bear. Yet she had run off with Emmanuel to Paris, dizzy with rapture, giddy with a kind of joy I had never known, nor, I secretly thought, wanted to. It would be many years before I discovered that, as some Frenchman had said in an aphorism I found, among French aphorisms, uniquely accurate, there are those who love and those who consent to be loved. That rapture, that dizziness, belongs only to those who love, and the price they pay, the price Gabrielle had paid, seemed to me too high. It was later, when I came to this understanding, that I began to wonder if Eleanor had loved as Gabrielle had loved. Of course, I thought, that is the only explanation. And like Gabrielle, she had lived to experience the perils of marrying the object of one’s passion.
Gabrielle’s family cut her off without a shilling, as was thought only proper. She laughed in their faces. I suppose the life in Paris was attractive, with its artists, its expatriates, its life on the Left Bank. But it is one thing to be a careless Hemingway; it is quite another to try and manage a household and a child on the irregular earnings of a genius. Gabrielle was patronized, anxious, and in exile. But she seldom went back to London even when Emmanuel did, and though she was supposed to have made overtures to her family, these were never reciprocated.