He laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of a hyena. It was a quiet sound.
“It’s naughty of you to threaten me, dear. I’ll never be rich, but I am a writer who earns royalties.”
“I could spit your royalties into a sink and they would disappear down the pipes.”
She licked her lips with her green tongue and began to sob without control. He stroked her head and she quieted down.
“I’m a witch, I really arm.”
He rocked her in his arms. She fell asleep, babbling to herself. He distributed dollar bills and returned to the Bentley with his cardboard satchel.
— 19 —
THEY COULD HEAR HER BABBLE DAY AND NIGHT. It was an incessant song, punctuated with a laugh that was close to the cackle of a mother hen. She babbled even while the night nurse bathed her, or while she smoked one of her filter tips, or had her filet of sole prepared by Sea Breeze’s gourmet chef, or was lifted onto her pony, Proud Margaret, tame as a carriage horse. They would strap her in and lead Proud Margaret by the nose; on a good morning, she and her pony might cover half an acre of ground. But she wouldn’t stop babbling.
It had something to do with books.
“Be a dear and lend me a cig,” she said. She could have been addressing her pony. And then she turned about to cluck at the sky, and God knows who her interlocutor was now. But you only had to listen. She was looking for some fabric in her own past, was weaving a tapestry while she rode Proud Margaret at a snail’s pace. The tapestry was about a certain year—1960—when she was touring Europe and didn’t even bother to dance. There was no shortage of suitors, my dears. Counts by the hundred, Swiss industrialists who mentioned marriage before Martha had a chance to sit down. I read Nabokov on the train to Nice. She preferred his tangled garden to the talk of a suitor. She couldn’t stop thinking of her library, shelf after shelf of books that had never been cataloged, never been touched. She was Minnie, the Tartar Queen, who would swallow the entire stock of bookstores that were about to close. Minnie’s husband had taught her well. “You must look them in the eye, and the price will go down and down.”
She did much more than that. The Tartar Queen tantalized these bookish men, drew them out of their cubbyholes, and scratched the sums that she owed them in her crabbed hand. But she never bothered with the books. Martha built a library and hadn’t even gone inside. She had Stanislaus stack the books on the shelves. He would look at her with the insufferable air of a servant who was conscious of every penny she had.
“Should I alphabetize them, Mum?”
And she would have to say, “Stannie, shut up! You’re becoming a real pain in the ass.”
But she shouldn’t have been so blasé with her own butler. She soon had a monstrosity in her flat, a tower of Babel that she had helped create. And when she had a teensy-weensy too much to drink, Martha could hear the books whisper among themselves. That’s why she went off to Europe. It was to escape the blitz. But she confided in her butler first.
“Stannie, can’t you hear that whispering? How do you keep sane?”
“I have earplugs, Mum. I sleep as sound as a saint.”
While she was gone, she had her girlfriends scout for some miserable graduate student who could bring order to her books. They found a perfect candidate, a Polish émigré who was studying the social sciences at Columbia. And he was still in the library when she returned to the States. It was autumn or winter, and the whole of Park Avenue was in the middle of a heating oil strike—deliverers stopped delivering, or perhaps 740 had run out of oil. Her young cataloger was standing on the library ladder, wrapped in an abominable squirrel-hair coat. It looked like a live animal with bald spots. Martha was so alarmed by this coat that she didn’t even bother to introduce herself. She was callous with him.
“Kosinski, you mustn’t come here in such a coat. It could frighten pregnant women in the building and make them miscarry.”
She was startled by her own preposterous remarks. She didn’t know of one pregnant woman at 740 Park. Fending off all those European suitors must have sharpened her imagination. But this cataloger had the balls to turn his back and slide along the ladder that led to her Babel of books. Finally he consented to glance at her, with pure poison in his dark eyes. It embarrassed Martha, and she broke out in hives.
“Are you Mrs. Will’s secretary?” he asked. “I myself have not met madam. I wear this coat in homage to Stalin. Stalin wore a coat like mine summer and winter. He found it when he was exiled in Siberia. He never took it off. He washed with his coat on, made love while wearing it, went hunting in his coat.”
“Enough!” she said. “Why are you so enamored of a mass murderer?”
The hives began to itch, but Martha wouldn’t rub her arms and legs in front of this hyena in squirrel hair. He began to chastise her.
“You and I have had a different upbringing, young lady. Stalin’s soldiers saved my life.”
The hives vanished and Martha began to blush. No one had called her young lady in a long, long time. Martha was old enough to be his aunt. Young lady. She liked it! And he hadn’t meant to flatter her. But she played out the part of her own secretary.
“Mum would like to know how you are cataloging her books? Is it by subject or alphabetical order?”
“By interest,” he said.
When she asked her arrogant dark-eyed cataloger to explain himself, he climbed down from the ladder. He seemed much taller now that he wasn’t hunched over on his wooden perch. But he wore the same French cologne as some of her suitors. She did not care for its tart aroma—it reminded her of oversweet flowers. She had to endure him and that stink.
“I cannot catalog books without having a peek inside the covers. It took me a month to wade through madam’s library.”
“You read every book?” Martha asked, trying to mask her astonishment.
“Not every line. A chapter will do . . . unless I fall into the dream of a book, and then I might glance at a second chapter and a third.”
“And the rest of madam’s library?”
“Stockpiled,” he said. “I found an ideal place for them. A walk-in closet in madam’s bedroom. I piled them near her shoes. She can incinerate them or sell these worthless books.”
She had to close her eyes and count, or she might have slapped his face and had him barred from 740. When she opened her eyes again, she was twice as angry.
“You’re a cataloger, not a couturier. Stanislaus permitted you into Mum’s bedroom?”
“I don’t need his permission. A butler knows nothing of books.”
“And did you catalog her blouses and sweaters while you were in the mood?”
He sniffed about with his beak of a nose, suspicious of a secretary who was such a shrew.
“I am not a burglar—what’s your name?”
“Charlotte Haze,” she said, spitting out the name of Lolita’s mom in the Nabokov novel she liked best.
There was a slight ripple in his forehead, no other sign. She decided to rip into his arrogance, fillet him and his squirrel-hair coat. But she’d caught a chill in this icy flat, and she started to sneeze. He removed his coat and furled it around her shoulders like a cape. She wanted to scream. The coat was drenched in that awful perfume.
“Cataloger,” she demanded, hoping to trap him into some extravagant claim, “which of Mum’s books do you like best?”
He laughed at her, exhibiting his large teeth.
“My dear Charlotte Haze,” he said, “Madam has a fixation on one book—I counted eleven copies of Lolita, with and without dust jackets. I consigned the copies without dust jackets to madam’s closet. I do admire that book. My favorite character isn’t Humbert Humbert or Clare Quilty . . . it’s Charlotte Haze. She gets short shrift in the novel. Trapped in a love triangle with her own daughter. But I smell another triangle, another trap, involving you, me, and Mum. Do you like to fool around with names and identities? Or was Mum so infatuated with the book, she had to hire another Charlotte Haze?”
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Martha was shivering now. “You really are an unbearable man. Do you often make fun of your own employers?”
He clicked his heels like one of the counts she had met. “I will leave this minute.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Kosinski, I’m wearing your coat.”
Both of them laughed, and they whirled around each other as if they were dancing. And Martha realized that this was the first time since she’d gone to London with Cuthbert on their last trip that she wanted to dance.
— 20 —
STILL SHE BABBLED, EVEN AFTER THE ONE SIP of sherry they allowed her. She babbled in the hydrotherapy room, where she sat in the whirlpool machine with a rubber cap on her head—it reminded her of the cap she had worn at swim meets in high school. And after they dried her and let her sit on the fenced-in veranda outside her room, Martha seemed to be involved in some drama with several voices.
“Our dear Martha’s a bit of a ham,” they laughed among themselves. “She has all the speaking parts.” But they didn’t try to shake her out of that long verbal dream. It was only when her butler came to Sea Breeze that Martha stopped babbling to herself.
“Stannie,” she cooed. “I suppose you’ve come to have me sign a million checks.”
“We have to pay your staff, Mum. Even the most loyal maid must eat once in a while.”
He liked using the royal we with her. Stanislaus probably had better schooling than she ever did. Cuthbert had stolen him from some dying duke. Stanislaus was raised among the nobility and didn’t much like Americans. But he was devoted to her. And he had a rage against Jerry, thought she never should have married him.
“My God,” she said, “you’re much better about books than I am. How would you rate him as a writer?”
“Rate whom, Mum?”
“Don’t play his game, Stannie. . . . My Polish ex with the pointy ears.”
“He’s a sorcerer, Mum. That’s how I would rate him. All his gifts, all his talents, are tied up with mischief. And since he writes with several hands, I can no longer tell what is really his.”
“Don’t talk riddles, Stannie. What do you mean?”
“Gabriela,” he said, and when he saw that frozen lip of hers and the bitterness that consumed her face, he was sorry he had said it. Little Gabriela had been Kosinski’s amanuensis and sexual slave, though it wasn’t quite clear whether she was his slave at all. He must have picked her up among his Polish connections. She wasn’t there during the first days of courtship. Perhaps he was only hiding her. But after Mum had married her sorcerer, Gabriela suddenly appeared. She was a stunner, with raven red hair, and when she walked up Mum’s marble steps, the maids pitied Mum and despised themselves.
Gabriela was barely five feet tall, buxom, with tresses that reached her rear end, like some medieval maiden. She never flirted with the sorcerer. She would closet herself with him in his study. And when she ventured outside to ask for a carrot or a piece of cake, she was always clutching a manuscript and a green pencil. She would crouch under her own crossed legs on Mum’s white sofa and mutter sentences to herself. Then she would mark up a page with the pencil in her hand.
Stanislaus never spied on her, though he might have for Mum’s sake. But Gabriela seemed to want company. And he didn’t have to prod.
“Would you believe it? I’m not allowed to take a chapter out of here. He searches under my bra. I never met such a secretive man. He thinks his sentences are sacred, but he couldn’t write one page in English all on his own.”
“Miss Gabriela, you could always quit.”
“That’s the problem. I can’t. I’m hooked on the son of a bitch. He’s my Dracula.”
And Stanislaus believed her. A bloodsucking sorcerer with pointy ears.
Gabriela would undergo sudden changes. She’d show up dressed as a man, her long hair pulled back and hidden under a hat. She’d talk in a husky voice, which frightened the maids. She could have been possessed by demons, and Stanislaus lacked the courage and the determination to drive them out of her. Then the husky voice would disappear, and she was Gabriela again, the pint-size bombshell. But the stability didn’t last. She would show up with her hair shorn, like Joan of Arc. She would have terrible fights in the sorcerer’s study, descend the stairs without a stitch, blue welts on her arms, in a state of hysteria. But Stanislaus was reluctant to get near a naked girl. It was Mum who would quiet her down. Then the three of them would go off to the “21” Club, the sorcerer with his cardboard satchel, Gabriela in a borrowed gown.
Stanislaus or one of the maids would find them next morning, with Mum sleeping in her mask at the foot of the bed. It was the oddest ménage à trois he had ever seen. The sorcerer was somewhere at the far side of the bed, while Gabriela would be lying in a silk nightgown, holding Mum’s hand. They looked like three errant children unable to have the simplest liaison.
They squabbled all the time. Gabriela slit her wrists—nothing too serious. Mum’s own doctor appeared at 740 in the middle of the night. Mum conspired with Stanislaus to move Gabriela into a residence for single women, a “nunnery,” where the sorcerer couldn’t find her. He screamed at Stanislaus, who tossed him down Mum’s marble stairs. Mum went on one of her binges while the sorcerer was away somewhere. Stanislaus phoned Sea Breeze, and a limo came to collect her. When the sorcerer returned from his trip, Stanislaus had him all to himself.
He gave no parties, nor could he get near Gabriela. He would lock himself in his study—an odd, barren corner with two desks and two cots—and come down to dinner promptly at seven in a plum-colored coat. It was Stanislaus who filled the sorcerer’s wineglass with buttermilk. The sorcerer glared at him during the meal.
“You don’t approve of me. You think I’m not good enough for her.”
“I think nothing of the kind. I’m a butler, sir, and butlers are not paid to think.”
“You’d strangle me in my bed if Mum gave the signal.”
Stanislaus wasn’t sure what devil had gotten into him. “I suppose I would,” he blurted, and the sorcerer smiled.
“Stanislaus, have some wine. I insist.”
“I am not permitted to imbibe in the presence of my employer or her guests.”
“But I’m not a guest. I’m married to Mimi, or haven’t you noticed?
“I have noticed, sir.”
“Can’t you call me Jerry or Jurek, or whatever name leaps into your mind?”
“Sorcerer,” Stanislaus said. “If I might take the liberty, sir.”
“Is that what the maids call me?”
“And the doormen, sir. That is your name in the building. I was the one who supplied it. The responsibility is all mine. You might want to voice a complaint with Mum.”
“But I have no wish to complain.”
“Then I will have that drink,” Stanislaus said.
And it was like slumming with the enemy. Stanislaus finished half a bottle of Pomerol that Mum had kept in her own little “cave” under the stairs, while the sorcerer gulped his buttermilk. The buttermilk made him tipsy. They were no longer sitting in Mum’s prize comb-back chairs. They’d climbed onto her enormous oak table and sat there, six feet apart.
“Sorcerer, I would like to strangle you in your bed without a signal from Mum. And one of these days I will. . . . Would you mind very much if I asked you a question?”
“Strangle me first,” said the sorcerer. “I always ask a woman to strangle me while we’re making love. That, my friend, is the secret behind the best orgasms.”
“But I am not a woman, sir, and I doubt that even your sorcery could turn me into one.”
“But you could pretend.”
“One of these days I will. . . . Sorcerer, does this Gavrila of yours really exist? The Christ-like Soviet savior who suddenly arrives in Poland and rescues a mute little boy from barbarians. I find that hard to believe. Not even Dostoyevsky would have dared pull such a trick. Did you know that his novels would often come to him in long hallucinations? He dictated all hi
s dreams to his second wife.”
“Ah, you’ve picked through Mum’s shelves like a man robbing a grave and settled on Madame Dostoyevskaya’s memoirs. And you believe her nonsense. Madame was a whore. She sucked off men at the train station to pay the bills. She pimped for her precious Fyodor, found him young girls to play with.”
“Lies,” said Stanislaus, who longed to cover his ears and kill the sorcerer. “There is no mention of such things in her book. She was a loving wife who sacrificed herself to her husband’s art.”
“He was a pedophile who raped ten-year-olds and hid behind his wife’s skirts.”
“You are no sorcerer, sir. You are a swine. And I will not listen.”
But Stanislaus sat on the table and poured another glass of Pomerol. He was stuck in the sorcerer’s invisible strings. Now he understood how her Polish protégé had driven Mum to distraction. The sorcerer continued to smile and smile.
“Lenin once said that all butlers who read books should be shot, because they are maggots who feast on other people’s minds. But I am not as ruthless as Lenin. I will not punish you, Stanislaus, for having feasted on my own flesh. . . . I wouldn’t be alive without Gavrila. Whatever compassion I have left comes from him. He ravished no one. Peasants offered their own wives to Gavrila. He shared their potatoes, nothing else. He had the regiment’s doctor attend to boys and old men with running sores. He parted with whatever medicine he had. And in my own mind, Stanislaus, I am still with Gavrila’s regiment.”
MUM’S CHECKBOOK WAS AS LONG AS A LEDGER. It wouldn’t fit into a briefcase. Stanislaus had carried it all the way from 740 in a huge shopping bag. He read out the names and exact figures to her while she sat on the veranda. She devoted a full hour to signing checks in a musical motion, as if she were savoring her own signature. Stanislaus had to write in the date—March 11, 1967. And it was Stanislaus who tore the signed checks from that ledger and deposited them in a cardboard envelope with accordion folders.
“Stannie, should I write a check for her?”
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