The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel
Page 21
“But that’s been going on a long time,” Elly pointed out. “For years he came home only on holidays. And that was before he was going with any girl.”
“Yes.” Max sighed. “He was always away from us, but not emotionally.” (Ah, Elly thought, to be away emotionally.) “In the important things,” Max continued, “he could always be counted on. Like the time Sarah was sick and Harry couldn’t afford a day and night nurse. We were all pretty poor then—you wouldn’t remember—” (The hell I don’t, she thought)—“and Alec flew in and sat up with her day and night, even though, at the time, he and Harry weren’t speaking. Now it’s different. When you were in trouble and I sent him a wire saying I was going to Vernon and he should meet me at the station there, that I needed help to handle the thing, I didn’t know what to do, he sends back a wire that he’s busy with a rehearsal and can’t come.”
Elly froze inside. All the efforts her mother had made to take Alec away from her had never succeeded and Uncle Harry’s hostility had never taken Alec away from her. Could Alec be the one who would remove himself from her, cutting himself from her love and out of her heart like a lost traveler slicing his way out of the jungle? She visualized the scene at Vernon, changing certain details. Alec sat next to her father in the audience while she danced. Their heads were close together as Alec whispered something to Max. After the concert Alec told her: I’ve convinced your father not to take you home. He’s going to enroll you at Bennington. Baby, be free but not too free. That was a way it could have been, if Alec had been there. Why hadn’t he come?
“Did you tell him what had happened to me?” Already it was something which had happened to her, rather than something she had done.
“Sure. I called him and told him. I have the feeling she didn’t want him to come.”
“Why not?”
Max shrugged. “It’s only a feeling, but I think maybe she wants to keep him away because she knows we won’t stand for it if he marries her. Can’t you see, Elly, how that would be her only hope? If she steams Alec up so he doesn’t depend on me for a living any more.”
Elly said nothing. She was still cold inside. Alec had been called on to help her and he had declined.
“Is he coming home for the Holidays?”
“I don’t know, darling. I’m leaving it up to your mother. She’s talking it over with Carl. She values his opinion so much.”
“So do I,” Elly said, the germ of an idea taking shape. “So do I.” That evening Elly drove into town as the shadowy atmosphere became all shadow with blurs of light from an occasional lamppost. She drove slowly, feeling the rhythmical pulse of the telegraph poles as their shadows fell upon her and were gone. The expectant time of day was just about over and the night change had set in. She became, at night, surer, stronger. The problem of direction was, for the time being, suspended. The night, unlike the day, was a simple unit of time and experience to be dealt with.
She had not decided whether or not she would go to the party Allan Van Bressner was giving until she found herself turning into the driveway of the Van Bressner house. Well, she thought, as long as I’m here. She was always dressed well enough to meet a sudden invitation anywhere, eschewing the blue jeans and sloppy shirts of the girls at Crofts. Her dress was a sort of armor against the exigencies of an unpredictable world. To live carelessly and easily was not for those at war.
Allan Van Bressner, a young man who attended some of Elly’s classes at Crofts, gave the appearance of shyness, but this was only his response to Elly. She made him stumble over words, feel awkward and generally ineffectual. She was aware of this, and her ordinary poise became an extraordinary poise when she confronted him.
He took her jacket and said, “What are you drinking?”
“Scotch on the rocks, thanks.”
He was then faced with the problem of disposing of her wrap before or after getting her the drink she had requested. He said, “Okay. Be right back.”
And he ran off with the wrap, leaving Elly drinkless and with a cool smile on her lips, a smile that was designed to project mystery and, above all, an ambiguity as to the state of her feelings. A few people she knew joined her and they chatted. Allan arrived with the drink. She held it, cool in her hand, for a moment and was horrified at the realization that she felt completely unable to continue standing where she was, talking to these people at a party, holding a drink in her hand. She gulped the liquid down before it had had time enough to chill adequately, and it burned going down. I don’t want to be here, she thought. The room before her separated itself into masses and blocks of color: a blue-gray mass where a group of men stood, and opposite that a bright red and yellow square where two girls had appeared from a bedroom. I should have been a painter, she thought, a modern painter—I don’t see people, I see forms and color.
She had another drink and went to the bathroom. When she reappeared the group she had been with had scattered, and she went to the nearest bedroom to find her jacket. She couldn’t stay. She hadn’t really wanted to come. But the disturbing thought was that she knew she hadn’t wanted to come and hadn’t wanted to stay away. She slipped out unnoticed.
There was a small cocktail lounge, the only decent one that Colchester boasted, and Elly continued her Scotch drinking there. She had never before systematically settled for an evening of drinking by herself, but it felt as familiar as an old habit. There was music dripping from a loudspeaker and she hoped it would not stop. Music all the time.
In a half hour she was quite drunk. She knew it first by two things: one, that a curious mindlessness she had felt since driving toward town earlier was gone and, two, that a dizziness took her when she moved her head. It was a delicious kind of dizziness and she reveled in it, turning her head from side to side while the room remained still and she reeled about inside. I’m always best alone, she thought. Gazing at the glass in her hand she saw it first as a glass, then as she stared longer she saw it as a rounded receptacle, and then as she continued to look intensely as if her eyes were a camera and she was taking a photograph, or rather a motion picture without motion, she saw the glass stripped of all its associations, of its similarity to a glass that held Old-fashioneds, of its relationship to all other glasses that held various liquors, but saw it as a rounded receptacle for liquid, primitive, unsophisticated. At the peak of this new perception she saw the glass much as a primitive man might have observed and evaluated the gourd from which he drank his water. Elly decided she liked being drunk.
She smoothed her dress and touched her hair and then, systematically, her forehead, eyes, nose and lips. She was not annoyed, this time, by the small mole mark to the right of and below her lower lip. She remembered what she had said to Danny, lying on the grass in Vermont. This is all we have, she had said. What had he called it? Sensory experience. That was it. It’s all we really have. The five senses and the hell with the sixth. But the senses were there to give us knowledge of things around us and she never seemed to learn anything about the world around her. Instead of knowledge they brought her consolation. The idea of music all the time—the throb of the bass viol was even and steady like a heartbeat—was essentially the idea that the life of the senses must never stop. And hearing, listening to sound was the most passive of all the sensual activities.
She closed her eyes and tried to see faces. For a while there was only color, but then Danny’s face appeared, merging into Alec’s, becoming Jay Gordon and Carl Warschauer. Surely it was the right man that was needed to fuse the sensual with the real. For how long had she, Elly Kaufman, been the only real person? She remembered what she had felt after being with Lang in the new house, and the reassurance it had given her. Anything was real, was alive, that was wet with life, unsatisfied.
What was all this Prince Charming crap? Did she really believe in it? Or did she like it but disbelieve it? She saw with a drunken clarity the dichotomy that seemed to exist in her. There was that which she liked or loved and there was that which she believed in. The words
were leading her as a silent stranger leads a blind man, to some end or at least an idea that was a resting point; an idea that might even reveal to her the reason for getting drunk. She liked the idea of salvation through a man, but she didn’t believe in it.
There was a young woman sitting in a near-by booth talking to an older man with a gray mustache. The woman wore no lipstick or make-up of any kind. Yet she was attractive in a stark sort of way. Elly wondered: Does she like to look that way or does she believe in it, or perhaps disbelieve in makeup? So much of what she (Elly) did, she did for negative reasons. Not because she desired something specific but because so much of the world of things to do, to be done, was tainted with undesire. She repeated the word aloud: “Undesire.” That woman, who now leaned forward in speaking to the man, Elly could see that she was at least forty-five and was surely very unhappy, judging from the expression around her mouth, could see that she was a woman who probably did almost everything from undesire.
People outside of her own home, and objects and things outside of the glass house, were so haphazard and off balance by comparison. The table at which the two conversing strangers sat was wobbly, and as one or the other leaned on it the glasses, one of them rim-soiled with lipstick, tottered dangerously. No tables in Elly’s glass house moved or shook. Soiled glasses were never to be seen outside of the kitchen, and even there were whisked instantly into the dishwasher. Even the light that brightened the smoky air seemed unclean, designed to conceal rather than to illuminate.
She was quite dizzy now, and it seemed to her that she had learned a great deal all of a sudden. What this knowledge was she did not exactly know, but it was a crystallization of the feeling she had always had that she must have lived a very long time to know all that she did. Perhaps she was the wandering Jewess and this life in a glass prison was only one of her many lives.
“Professor Lanner,” she said, seeing his dark face before her eyes, the bluish area on his chin where he had shaved like the mark of an old wound. “How about salvation, Professor?” she asked. “Who saved you? Your wife, perhaps? And who’s to save me? Everybody saves somebody. Maybe if I save someone, someone will then be obliged to save me. Tit for tat.” Lanner’s mephitic countenance wavered and disappeared. She honestly had no idea if he had been there or not.
On the way home, she drove as slowly as she could—her reflection in the windshield had told her that she was drunk—and once she thought she heard a siren and held her breath for twelve counts. When she felt safe, she breathed again.
At home she stood in front of the bathroom mirror in her slip, swaying back and forth rhythmically, her eyes fixed on the reflection in the glass.
“I love you,” she said, “but what good is that? You can’t save me. And I can’t save you. We’re the greatest pair of starcrossed lovers who ever lived. Lovers kept apart by families, lovers kept apart by war, lovers kept apart by death, by money—compared to us they had it easy. Look at us—we love and we’re kept apart by what? By identity. X is equal to X by the axiom of identity. Anyway, it’s nice that I don’t hate you. Not too often, anyway. Am I really drunk? Why aren’t people always drunk? They have the cure and they don’t know it. Why? Why?” She stepped closer to the mirror and said, “Why don’t you answer me? Why? Why won’t you answer me?” She flung a hand over her mouth, as she was afraid she had begun to shout, but wasn’t quite sure, and she mumbled, “Why don’t you answer?” moving closer to the mirror step by step.
Carl and Elly were not holding hands as they walked in the garden, but their strolling manner suggested hand-holding, secret-sharing. It was early evening and the air was damp. The ground beneath their feet was littered with leaves, most of them dry and brown, although here and there a bright, fresh-looking green leaf lay in the brown-and-red richness. Elly’s eyes were on the ground as she stepped aside here and there to crush a brown, deliciously curled leaf. She could feel the dried fibers separate and hear the clicking sound with pleasure. The ones that were not as dry or curled within themselves did not crunch as well, and these she avoided after a while.
“And it’s natural for a woman like your mother to depend on her rabbi, because it was what her mother did and her mother before her.”
“I don’t think it’s so natural. Did your mother do it?”
“Are you starting that again? I wish you wouldn’t even joke about it.” He laughed. “I’m a nervous boy.”
She glanced at him. “Yes,” she said, “you are a boy.”
“That’s right,” he replied. “Just a boy, getting free meals by giving advice to your family.”
“They’re not really free, are they? After all, you have to spend time with me.”
“That’s one of the nicest things about it.”
“Yes, we do get along nicely. You’re a little like my uncle Alec.”
“Am I?”
“A little. That’s really what they want your advice about. I’m a problem, but nothing like Alec. He’s a big headache. Did they tell you what happened to me at school?”
“No,” he lied.
“I got myself knocked up and then I had an abortion.” She chose her words deliberately, wanting to shock him, was rewarded by his swiftly indrawn breath.
“Really? That’s too bad. Or do you think it wasn’t too bad?”
“Nobody got hurt, so how bad can it be? My mother doesn’t even know.”
“Then why did you tell me?”
“Because you’ve told me at least one very intimate secret and I figure I owe you at least one in return. You know, tit for tat.”
“Well, your secret is safe with me, as they say in the movies.” He waited for her reply, expecting to hear her avow secrecy as well, even in a mock manner. Instead she hopped along, crunching leaves underfoot with every step. Finally she spoke.
“Alec is very important to me and I’m beginning to agree with Dad.”
“You mean about the girl, and marriage?”
She nodded.
“To tell the truth,” he said, “I haven’t been too sure what to advise your folks about that. It seems to me the girl ought to have a chance to meet the family and be met by them. It shouldn’t all be so cut and dried. She’s not Jewish, so the whole thing’s impossible—that’s pretty inhuman. Of course I can’t go on record as favoring in any way a mixed marriage—you can see that—but I’ve been thinking that she ought to be given a chance—”
“She ought to be given nothing,” Elly blurted out suddenly.
“Do you hold it so much against her that she’s not of your religion?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course not. I’ve met her and I know she’s not his kind.”
“Isn’t that rather up to him to decide?”
“Not if he wants Dad to continue supporting him.”
The coolness with which she stated the truth of a complex and sad financial dependency within her family disturbed Carl.
“That’s something he should decide too,” he said, unwittingly falling into her trap.
“You’re right,” she said quickly. “Dad should write him, telling him to come home alone, or not to come at all, with the understanding that the money would stop in that case. Then he could make a clear choice.”
“That makes it pretty rough on him.”
“Nevertheless, that’s what you’re going to tell Dad to do, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, Elly. I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Carl. You know you agree. And wouldn’t it look bad for a rabbi, who came from a mixed marriage himself, to seem to be sympathetic to another one?”
He took her arm in his hand and looked at her face, crossed as it was by the shadows of the wind-waved branches of the trees. “What do you mean?” he said. “No one else knows of that.”
“Of course,” she said. “And no one will. But I really am going to insist that you do what I say in this business with Alec and Annette.”
“Are you threatening me? I thought you loved your uncle.”
“You’re crazy, Elly. I can’t do something like that because I was stupid enough to tell you about myself.”
“You have to.” She resumed walking again and he followed. The leaves grew fewer on the ground and she turned and retraced her steps. Carl followed.
“Well?” she said, and turned only to find him moving swiftly toward the house where preparations were being made for dinner. She continued her pursuit of the dead leaves, quite sure that Carl would do what she had asked. Alec would be here soon, alone. But what if he chose to stay with her? She wiped the thought away instantly and, looking down at the leaf on which she was stepping, she noticed that it was almost perfectly heart-shaped. Come to think of it, she thought, all hearts are made in the shape of a leaf.
Over the coffee cups Max remarked to Elly, “Carl feels the time has come to be firm with Alec. I’m going to write him to come for the holidays, without the girl, or not at all.”
Instantly Elly was depressed.
“That’s a damned good idea,” she said listlessly, glancing at Carl, who stared at the floor.
“Elly, don’t curse in front of Carl.”
“You mean it’s all right to curse when he’s not here?”
“Don’t be smart!” Rose said. “There’s nothing to worry about, Max. He’ll come without her. He won’t give up what he has from us. He’s not like you. He’s not used to fending for himself. He’s had it too easy.”
Max nodded wearily and sipped his coffee. “You’re right, and sometimes I think it’s my fault—that I was wrong in helping him. If he would have learned to stand on his own two feet right away—”
“If he had,” Elly interrupted, “he wouldn’t need you and he’d marry who he wanted to—maybe a Chinese girl. A nice Jewish Chinese girl, of course.”