The Players Come Again

by Amanda Cross

  “She was pleased with the compliment, apparently, and informed him with a certain complacency that she had ten moons, and always had had.

  “You know, Reed,” Kate interjected, “I haven’t heard anyone mention moons on fingernails since I was very young, and my mother taught me to be proud of my ten moons. Others, I gathered with that horrible youthful arrogance my mother did everything possible to encourage, had to push their cuticles back to reveal their moons, if any.”

  “Are you telling me what you think happened—all right, what you know happened—or are you composing a cultural history of nails?”

  “Am I boring you?” Kate curtly asked.

  “You’re not, but I think Hansford and Dorinda soon may. Did they say anything of use to you in your biographical endeavors?”

  “They discussed Emile, whom I gather Dorinda never met. After he married her aunt, they came to the Jersey shore during several summers. Dorinda’s father said it was clear the bloom had left the lily. Dorinda’s grandfather, the sneaky one who tried to entice little girls on the Jersey shore, was going strong and that was why Hilda came with Emile, because her father adored his daughter and wanted to see her with the man she had married. I think the family found him rather a drip, as they used to say in Dorinda’s day. Hansford gathered that he drank most of the time and was always impatient and bored. Dorinda’s daddy said that was because he didn’t have enough to do in life; being the son of a famous author was hardly a full-time occupation. He didn’t even seem to care much about Nellie; they left her in Paris with her grandmother for that visit. Dorinda was only a baby, but she remembered very well their talking about it. She knew Nellie was her age, and, beloved only child that she was, couldn’t imagine that anyone who had a child her age would go all the way across the ocean without it. Since Dorinda’s mother hated to leave her, she thought Nellie’s mother should feel the same and hate to leave her daughter, but that wasn’t the case.”

  Kate smiled at Reed. “The fact is, Hansford’s knowledge of the various family vicissitudes of the Foxxes was detailed enough so that he had no trouble understanding what Dorinda was talking about. But it was unclear if she could provide anything of use to a derailed biographer. He asked her if she had ever met Gabrielle, although he was pretty sure she hadn’t. And of course,” Kate added, “once he got onto Gabrielle I got out my recording skills, and remember exactly what he said she said; well, more or less.”

  “Which was?”

  “ ‘No,’ Dorinda told him, ‘she didn’t come to my wedding, although everyone tried to persuade her to come. My mother went to London to visit her in the nursing home, but by then she was gaga, or as close as made no difference. I was sorry; I’ve always had a kind of thing for Gabrielle.’ ”

  “ ‘Thing?’ ” Hansford asked.

  “ ‘I mean,’ Dorinda said, ‘I always thought her story was so interesting, or would have been if anyone could have found out the details. I mean, she ran off with him when she was so young, and what can life have been for her, always in a strange city, with no family, probably no friends, losing her son and having to give up her grandchild? She was supposed to have been so beautiful, the typically beautiful English girl.’

  “Here Hansford made a joke he was rather proud of, so he repeated it to me: ‘with high coloring and low resistance,’ Hansford said. It’s the kind of thing he would say,” Kate added. “Have you had enough of this?”

  “Did Dorinda say anything else you’ve got by heart?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. She said she imagined that Emmanuel Foxx when young was irresistible, one of those handsome, dashing men who carry their daimon with them, who crash through all the rules of boring, bourgeois existence and fear.”

  “I take it he saw that as the invitation it so clearly was,” Reed said.

  “All you men are the same,” Kate muttered.

  “Well, we all have functioning brains, if that’s what you mean,” Reed answered. “Or most of us.”

  “Well, you’re right, of course. I suppose the semiotics of sexuality are rather clearly delineated.”

  “Get on with the damn seduction story, and spare me your theories of signifiers.”

  Kate laughed. “Well, Hansford suggested that such irresistible types as the Emmanuel Foxx she was describing cause immediate joy and lifelong suffering. He asked her if she didn’t think Gabrielle had suffered.

  “ ‘Of course she did,’ Dorinda said. ‘But at least she was part of something important. Something that mattered.’ ”

  Reed winced. Kate ignored him. “Hansford asked if she really thought any novel, however celebrated, mattered that much. A strange question from a professor of literature, of course, but he was now on the road to sex with professional cares behind him. This was where he was a fool, needless to say, since the idiot might have found something more out about Gabrielle if he had kept his mind on his job.”

  “And what did Dorinda say, as though I couldn’t guess.”

  “She said, as you have no doubt guessed, that she thought art mattered more than anything, and that to be able to create it, or to help someone create it, was a splendid destiny. Hansford pointed out that she hadn’t married an artist. I gather Dorinda played further with her bread, rolling it into yet more dirty pellets until Hansford thought he would scream in agony; he said the worst part was there was no way to avert his eyes.”

  “But he didn’t avert his eyes, and they ended up in bed. In his apartment?”

  “So I gather. I think Dorinda’s husband was in the habit of dropping home from time to time, to refresh himself at the fount of domesticity, so she didn’t like to chance it there.”

  “This is beginning to sound like Les Liaisons Dangereuses; was a good time had by all?”

  “Well, Hansford didn’t go into details, to do him justice, but I did rather gather that she was trading the sex for the conversation; she seemed in rather a hurry.”

  “I don’t think she sounds a very promising person,” Reed said.

  “I’m not so sure. Remember, this was some years ago. That may have been her first foray into another possible life. Dorinda’s probably twenty years older than I am, but in an odd way we grew up in the same conventional world. I think I understand her; I think I even sympathize. The next step, clearly, is to talk to her.”

  “I gather they met again, and he got the photographs. Will you mention Hansford when you talk to her?”

  “Not unless she does,” Kate said. “And with any luck, I shan’t have to see him again either. It doesn’t take great skill to figure out that the dalliance with Dorinda may have provided excellent photographs for his book but did less than nothing for his marriage, nor that Judith had abandoned her Gabrielle project only as the price of a reconciliation. Mark, it was to be inferred, had similarly abandoned Dorinda, and had dedicated the tenth-anniversary edition of his biography to his wife.”

  Chapter Four

  Dorinda was, Kate felt confident, as emphatically through with Mark Hansford as he with her. Either she would never again speak about the Foxxes, or she would be relieved to speak about them with someone else. Why not, then, start with Dorinda? Kate felt a strong if unanalyzed inclination to undertake Anne only after her leave had really begun. Besides, a little discreet telephoning had revealed that Anne was at the moment abroad; Nellie was abroad, one understood less momentarily. Dorinda was right here in New York. As to the question of whether or not her relationship with Mark Hansford had soured her on the whole question of Emmanuel Foxx and his connections, one could only learn by asking. Kate decided not to write her request for a meeting; the little evidence she had suggested that Dorinda was likelier to be cooperative on impulse rather than on deeper thought or, worse, consultation with her husband. Husbands have a way of counseling caution; Kate did not yet know that this particular husband was caution personified.

  Dorinda’s response, upon
being telephoned by Kate, was certainly abrupt: “If it’s pictures you want, they’ve all been published; I really don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “Will you nonetheless be kind enough to meet and talk with me?” Kate asked. She hoped her voice didn’t sound as plaintive as she feared; sorrowful requests were not Kate’s mode. “I would be delighted to take you to lunch.”

  There was a long pause during which Dorinda was perhaps reflecting that lunch with a woman could hardly hold so many adventures and disappointments. It would be entirely beneficial for Kate to learn, in the not too distant future, that if she could read the mind of a mere male professor like Hansford, she was not half so clever when it came to Dorinda. Women who go to bed from time to time with less than clever men are not necessarily less than clever.

  Dorinda agreed to the lunch; time, date, and place were settled. Kate immediately set to brooding about her questions. But it was hard to know what to ask a woman who had no doubt been asked everything before, was fed up with the subject of the Foxxes, and, like most unprofessional women of her generation, probably didn’t see much point in talking to a woman anyway.

  In this Kate, as she was soon to discover, did Dorinda an injustice. Dorinda might be over sixty, but she was not past the ability to undergo revelations. Still, impatience was certainly her prevailing note as she and Kate sat down to lunch. Since Kate had chosen the restaurant, it was devoted less to ethnicity than to graciousness, including widely spaced tables and unobtrusive waiters. Dorinda declined a drink, and immediately began to eviscerate the bread.

  Remembering Anne’s account of Dorinda, Kate was pleased to find that same theatrical, emphatic, finely hewn quality Anne had evoked still evident in the woman sitting across the table. The high cheekbones, the deeply sunken blue eyes, the fine, rather wild hair were there, palpable behind the wrinkles, the crow’s feet, the drooping flesh above the eyes, almost, Kate thought, as though Dorinda were a young actress who had been made up to play herself as an old woman. Still slim, using her reading glasses as though they were a prop in a play, Dorinda astonished Kate with her double presence, simultaneously young and old, simultaneously stern and the same impulsive girl Anne had described.

  Kate, judging her own mood with the most delicate of measurements, ordered one vodka martini with an olive: salt sharpened her senses. Dorinda, however, did not await Kate’s introduction of her subject.

  “So you want to write on Gabrielle; well, somebody ought to. I mean, perhaps it’s time somebody stopped considering Emmanuel the world’s best authority on women and looked into how he treated the women in his life. Do you know Mark Hansford?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, having flirted for the briefest moment with the possibility of, if not lying, shading the truth. “I can’t say I thought him likely to become one of my favorite people.”

  “I threw myself at him, more or less,” Dorinda flatly said. “I was just starting, at that time, to realize what kind of life I’d been buried in for all those years, and he was my first fling beyond its boundaries. It was a stupid thing to do; I don’t think it took me very long to figure that out. We met once again, to go over the pictures. I let him have them because it seemed to be separating me from my past. That was before I realized that I had two pasts, before my marriage and after. Anyway, if you talked to him, perhaps he told you that his wife wanted to write on Gabrielle. I gather she gave it up when Mark returned to the fold. I thought then and I think now it’s a damn good idea. What made you think of it?”

  “A publisher thought of it,” Kate said. “He offered me a contract. I was intrigued.”

  “Why start with me?”

  “You’re here in New York. But the main reason was your wonderful pictures. There must be some story behind those pictures.”

  “Mark didn’t think so. He just wanted the pictures.”

  “His book didn’t say what camera you used.”

  “A Leica. I’ve got a new one now. But I’ve always preferred a range-finder camera, particularly for portraits. My husband has one of those single-lens reflex jobs that sets the aperture and speed, in fact everything but the focus, and it will do that if you just want a sweeping scene. I’m not putting those cameras down; they just don’t interest me. Perhaps it’s nostalgia. I got my first Leica when I was twelve, from German refugees, an M-three. I still have it. So, I think, does Anne.”

  Kate, who was, looked impressed and questioning.

  “My father was given two, actually, and he gave one to Anne. I think she still has it; at least, she had it a while ago and said she would never willingly part with it. Did you really want to talk about cameras?”

  But Kate faced a harder question than that. Ought she to mention Anne’s memoir? Simon Pearlstine had put no restrictions upon her, but might not Dorinda resent that memoir, or even the fact of its having been written? She would not have to be a saint to feel that Anne had usurped her experience, her life. Dorinda, as Kate would soon discover was her wont, said the unexpected.

  “Have you read the essay Anne wrote on our childhood, or was that sent to a different publisher?”

  “I have read it. That memoir was part of the reason the publisher decided upon a biography of Gabrielle. Yet in a way, it was more a biography of you and Anne. What a wonderful childhood.”

  “Do you really think so?” Dorinda asked, and looked at Kate as though actually awaiting, interested in, her answer. Dorinda was turning out rather differently than Kate had expected, a fact in which Kate silently rejoiced. She particularly admired people whose every opinion was not predictable.

  “No,” Kate said. “Not really. It’s considered bad form to complain about wealthy childhoods, and I can understand why. If I had not had one, I would certainly think that anyone unhappy under those conditions was a fool.”

  “As Heathcliff says about the Lintons in Wuthering Heights. I understand you’re a professor of English literature.”

  “Where did you pick up that understanding?” Kate asked. She had said nothing about herself on the telephone.

  “I do research,” was Dorinda’s only rather enigmatic answer.

  “Well,” Kate said, recovering herself, “you’re certainly right about Heathcliff. Who would rather be a Linton, except, of course, everybody who hasn’t been? Certainly not Cathy.”

  There was a perceptible pause. Kate was occupied with readjusting her assumptions, a task as welcome as it was difficult. She hoped she would not have to fill in the silence with meaningless chatter, but was gearing herself for this unpleasant task (Virginia Woolf had called it beating up the waves of conversation) when Dorinda spoke. She had apparently decided to fill Kate in on the facts. “As you probably already know, I never met Emmanuel or Gabrielle, but I heard about them so much from Hilda and my father, and later from Nellie, that I felt I knew them. My mother went over to visit Gabrielle in her last years in the nursing home, but she was really out of it by then, so there wasn’t much more to learn. But I feel I was there, with my mother, after hearing her description. Gabrielle would suddenly wake up and it seemed to Mummy that she would start up, frightened, and then remember something satisfactory, and sink back with the smallest of smiles, as though it had come back to her that everything was okay, it was taken care of.”

  “What was ‘it’?”

  “I don’t know. There may not have been anything. But Mummy is very good at re-creating scenes, at making you see them. I suppose it comes from living with the Goddards and putting up with the scenes only by describing them later. Goddard scenes were always wild.”

  “They aren’t anymore?”

  “No. Grandpa died. Then Hilda. Then Daddy. There’s only Mummy and me left. She approves of my life, which was the sort I think she always wanted, but sometimes we sit around and remember and laugh. Just the other day she described how every time she got a workman in to do some needed repair, if she didn’t warn Daddy and pl
ead with him not to interfere, he would come across the man doing his work and shout questions and suggestions at him at the top of his voice, his normal way of speaking, of course, so that inevitably the workman would put down his tools and stomp out. Mummy always had to plead with the workman to come back and explain, in the nicest possible way, that her husband was a harmless lunatic.”

  “But I gather his devotion to his sister was extreme, especially when she married Emile Foxx.”

  “It was always extreme. Hilda was the apple of her father’s and her brother’s eye—does anyone use that expression anymore? They worried about her when she married Emile, but secretly I think they thought it very clever of her to bring such a famous writer into the family. I used to think so myself.”

  Kate nodded her comprehension of the change of mind Dorinda suggested.

  “Lately, I’ve thought a good deal about Gabrielle. Mostly because I began recently to think about my mother. I mean really think. She saw Gabrielle as often as anyone still living. You ought to try to talk with her.”

  “What is it you research?” Kate asked because suddenly she really wanted to know.

  “I work in a hospital lab. My husband helped me to get the job, and I turned out to be rather good at it. I’m interested in medicine, which is probably what I saw in him in the first place.” Dorinda paused. “Tell me, does everyone say things to you they didn’t even know they thought, let alone thought of saying?”

  “I suspect I just came along at the right time. What do you do in the hospital, exactly?”

  “Someone has a fever, who knows why? Not the doctors, who find that their antibiotics won’t bring it down; they have to resort to wet sheets, as though it were a century ago. But, aha! They do have technological advances at their disposal! So, they drill into the poor man, get out a little round section of his liver, and bring it down for me to do things with.”