At Harperley Hall, I occupied the guest room, which used to be Mark’s room, Dana’s son. I vaguely remembered having seen him once or twice at the clubhouse in Métis Beach. He’d been Geoff Tees’ age, with black hair and suspicious dark eyes. After his father’s death, he stopped accompanying his mother during the summer, preferring to spend his vacations in New York with his grandparents. A strange child, Dana said. He was a homebody. Now he lived in London, and their relationship was stormy at best. Mark was what you might call a fundamentalist Jew whose conversion had been a trial for Dana. She very rarely spoke of it.
My presence at Harperley Hall might have been filling a gap. Dana seemed eager to take care of me like a son, generously paying for everything, from my courses and clothing to my nights out. I was ready to work, but she refused — the important thing was to concentrate on my studies. We’d take care of the work permit some other time. Once she finally got Robert Egan on the line, he’d been so furious he answered none of her questions. “Real accusations, Robert?”
He shouted, “If ever he sets foot back here, I’ll have him arrested!” Then he threatened to go after her as well for aiding and abetting. Dana hung up, visibly shaken. “We’re in no hurry, Romain. Let’s clear things up before we get you your papers. Don’t worry about it. I’ve got great lawyers, the best in New York. We won’t be intimated by that bastard.”
All I wanted was to believe her. I’d never been so happy in my life.
4
That thunderous character, the chutzpah and corrosive repartee, dark eyes that glimmered with thought, and something of Ava Gardner in the shape of her face.
In the pictures she showed me of herself as a girl of eight or nine, Dana Feldman already possessed that shadow of arrogance in her eyes, the arrogance of those who know they’ll accomplish great things. I liked it when she flipped through her yellowing photo albums, commenting on the pictures with nostalgia, a glass of something in her hand, always surprised by the distance of memories. Photos of Ethel and her in their family home in Queens, a modest Jewish home — her mother managed a charity, and her father gave private violin lessons. Dana had lacked for nothing, though her parents knew that the environment they offered her — the best schools, opera tickets, diction classes — would end up making her world too narrow. The sisters took me on a visit to the rather dreary neighborhood they grew up in much later, moved to tears by the memories that came to them. They’d been concerned by the growing deterioration since their parents had died — black families had replaced Jewish families who’d themselves moved to more pleasant districts over time — repeating breathlessly, as if to console themselves, that things must have been better back then. The park where the Feldman family liked to picnic on warm summer days had been disfigured when the city cut down all the sick elms, including those on the sidewalk in front of her old home. Their bare stumps were still there. In her old photographs you could still see the stately trees throwing long shadows on the tiny, scrupulously maintained Feldman lawn.
She showed me pictures of her at nineteen and twenty, with her classmates from the class of 1943 at Barnard College. She studied literature, and you couldn’t miss her — Dana posing proudly, chin raised, God, she was beautiful, it would be impossible to be modest when you looked like that. She would say, with indulgent gaiety, “The other girls thought I was a real snob, but I didn’t care.” Even back then she was sure her writing would make a mark. She wouldn’t follow the path of the jealous and ambitionless girls who welcomed the self-constructed prison of the housewife, withering like houseplants without sunlight or rain. No, not she, “What can I say, Romain? I was far too serious for my age. And pretentious.” She laughed.
Among the other girls, there were pretty ones, but none as pretty as she, and I began looking for those who might have accepted the affront of her beauty and her friendship without succumbing to jealousy. I asked, curious, “Did you have any friends?” She pointed to a tall blond girl with pale eyes and a straight jaw. “Nora Toohey.” And saying her name out loud, Dana burst into stories, telling how they both loved to go out and listen to the new style of music that was all the rage in the forties — bebop jazz — music for the war years in Europe, though before the humiliation of Pearl Harbor, before America intervened. It was rapid fire, dissonant, subversive, it transgressed the borders of the predictable, it made her shiver all over, sending her into a trance. Sometimes we listened to some of her old records at Harperley Hall, eyes closed, one foot tapping out the beat — Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk. Magicians of improvisation she saw play every Monday night with her friend Nora at Minton’s Playhouse, in Harlem.
“I saw Monk once with Nora at Minton’s. John McPhail was there. Do you remember him from Métis Beach?”
No, I was too young, I never knew the man. I expected her to show me pictures of him but instead her face darkened. She shut the album abruptly, as if its contents had suddenly become unbearable.
She’d noticed him, sitting alone at a table in the back of Minton’s narrow smoke-filled room. A hint of sadness about him, deep, intense eyes, his head and body moving, letting themselves be moved by Thelonious Monk’s disconcerting music. He was the only white man in the room that night, but wasn’t aware of it. A young white man with the air of an aristocrat, she saw it in the way he picked up his glass of Crown Royal and brought it to his lips.
“Class, Romain, like I’d never seen.”
In the living room at Harperley Hall, she moved to the teak bookcase filled with an impressive collection of albums. “I had to speak with him. As if there was, that night, an opportunity I couldn’t miss,” she laughed. “I was such an idiot.”
She got up from her table, and Nora grabbed her wrists, asking her what she was doing. Thelonious Monk had just begun one of his long silences on the piano, stilling the crowd at Minton’s Playhouse. “I was wearing a little red jersey dress, rather becoming. Everyone looked at me and tried to see under it.”
She took a record out of its sleeve, placed it on the turn-table. “Epistrophy, Monk. The piece he was playing that night.” She grabbed a Menthol Kool, Monk’s music filling the living room. She stood, her eyes closed. “Monk. The fabulous Monk. He still hadn’t moved, his hands suspended over the keyboard; the whole room held its breath. No one knew what he was going to do.” Apparently, Monk sometimes stopped playing right in the middle of a piece, he’d get up, start dancing or running around his piano, disappear from stage, return, laughing, and continue his piece where he’d left it, with more energy and insanity than before, making the whole crowd go crazy. She continued, still enthralled, “And there he was, sitting, back bent, legs apart, hands hanging in empty space. Then, a victorious smile appeared on his sweaty face, as if he’d just found his way, and he began playing again, kneading every note with his stiff fingers, feverish. And the room went wild.”
She stopped speaking, pensive.
“And then?” I asked.
“I took advantage of the applause to make my way between the tables towards John.”
Her smile returned and she began speaking gaily again. After having called a taxi for Nora, she and John walked around Harlem, letting themselves be guided by the notes that escaped from behind the closed doors of jazz clubs. Perhaps they were making a show of their courage, demonstrating to each other that they weren’t afraid, they were different from the rest, which meant they shared something. After all, whites walking in Harlem at night were a rare sight. John was happy, savouring the autonomy he had won for himself that night, after having freed himself from his father, with the pretext that he was beginning a cold.
She took a drag of her cigarette, poured herself a cognac. “I asked him if his father would be angry when he realized he wasn’t in his hotel room. He answered, ‘My father stays at the Waldorf; I stay at the Algonquin.’ I was surprised, of course. His father loved the Waldorf’s ostentation, while he was depressed by it. He p
referred the Algonquin, and the impression of being surrounded by the ghosts of all the writers who met there for lunch in the twenties. That’s when I told him that I wrote, and his beautiful face lit up. Of course he asked what I wrote about. I was sure I was going to disappoint him, ‘No, not novels. I write about women,’ I said. ‘But publishers aren’t ready to take the risk.’ He said, ‘What risk?’ as if he didn’t live in the same time and place as I, and hadn’t seen the problem! I wanted to kiss him. I said, ‘Publishing a critique of a society they themselves endeavour to defend, can you imagine? Publishers are afraid. Timid.’ I didn’t know why, but I was uncomfortable talking to him about it. I was curious to know more about these separate hotels.”
Sudden, violent emotion took possession of her. Seeing her so vulnerable, an incredible desire to hold her filled me, followed by a sort of panic when I thought of Darren, his eyes blind to everything but her that night, fear at the idea that I too would fall under her spell. I chased the idea away by going to grab a beer in the kitchen. Except for a few lamps in the living room, the apartment was dark. Rosie had gone to bed a long time ago.
“So what was the story behind the two hotels?”
She blew her nose. Monk played, accompanied by Kenny Clarke.
“John said that it allowed him to skip out on his duties without having to face the consequences. And go out to jazz clubs that his father called, without a trace of irony, Sodom and Gomorrah.” She giggled. “His father suspected nothing. The idea of separate hotels had been sold to him a long time ago. John and his father owned a large steel company in Canada. The Canadian government depended on them for the war effort. Each in his own hotel meant there was no risk — her voice cracked — no chance of both of them dying if there was a fire. It was the same for airplanes. Never both on the same flight. It was their rule.”
She was crying now. I didn’t know how to console her.
Each time Dana spoke of John, she needed at least two days to get back on her feet. She would seek refuge in her room, blinds drawn, knocking herself out with sleeping pills. Worried, Rosie tapped at her door every two or three hours, walked softly, placed plates of food on the bedside table, taking back the previous plates, still full. Sometimes I’d look after Dana, sit next to her, hold her hand. She’d wake up, groggy, looking at me with wet eyes, her diction made soft by the sedatives: “He hasn’t felt a thing in a long time, while I’ll be in pain for the rest of my life.”
I was eleven when John McPhail died. I had no memories of him, but I could picture the front page articles: RICH INDUSTRIALIST, JOHN MCPHAIL, DIES IN PLANE CRASH — MÉTIS BEACH IN MOURNING, THE SMALL COMMUNITY LOSES ONE OF ITS MOST ILLUSTRIOUS MEMBERS. The same blurry picture accompanied every article, a charred mass in the shape of a cross in the snow. Someone had died, burned alive. Someone who spent his summers in Métis Beach. That made quite the impression on me. As usual, father and son were travelling separately, and the son drew the short straw. His small Beechcraft crashed in a snow-covered field in Ontario as he was making his way to the opening of a new factory owned by McPhail Steel Co. This was in 1956. John was thirty-five. The next morning, crushed, Dana had flown to New York, fleeing her responsibilities and abandoning her twelve-year-old son Mark to John’s parents. “Take care of him. I haven’t the strength.” For weeks, she hid in the large apartment in Harperley Hall, the one they had bought together a few years before, when John realized Dana wasn’t happy in Montreal. And yet, after their wedding, in 1943, she had had no hesitations about following him to Canada, with war in Europe, fear all around, and the uncertain future making the material world secondary. Dana wanted to be with John, that’s all that mattered. But life in Montreal ended up weighing on her.
After her husband’s death, Dana wrote frenetically to drive away grief. To drive away the hateful feeling that had grown in her in Montreal — though she had no awareness of it yet; she was suffering too deeply to begin analyzing herself. But later she saw it, that feeling of having lied to the little girl she’d been, the promise she had made. She wanted to make up for lost time, and those long hours spent stooped over her Underwood paid off — Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Hudson Review published her short stories, all starring desperate women seeking emancipation. Her characters succeeded, though at great cost.
Her story “The Broken Vending Woman” was condemned and acclaimed in equal parts. The story of a woman, Karen, whom Dana compared to a vending machine. You slipped bills into a slot (get the picture?) in exchange for services — a warm meal when you got home after work, child-rearing, meticulously done housework, smiles, cheerfulness, tenderness, sexual relations. Exhausted, Karen cracks. How do you react when a vending machine doesn’t work? You shake it; in a rage, you hit it. The seeds of her sensational book The Next War had been sown.
5
“Can you tell me what you find so interesting about your friend Moïse? He drinks and lives like a hobo.”
A hobo! Hurtful, unjust words! Dana didn’t trust him. She disapproved of the power he had over me. “Can’t you see he tries to attract attention with his stories of being some sort of wretch? A dirty home, a job that pays nothing. No one with any sense brags about living a life of poverty.”
Moïse. As if she were saying: you don’t know how to choose your friends. Dana could go to hell. Anyway, The Next War was taking up all of her attention; she couldn’t control my comings and goings.
In our free time, Moïse and I continued our tours of New York — Chinatown, Turtle Bay, the Bronx, all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel, which we walked through, our windbreakers tied around our ears, looking like the Arabs Kerouac mentions in On the Road — coming in to blow up New York. We hung out in front of the Chelsea Hotel like groupies, in hopes of seeing Jack Kerouac (“that’s where he wrote On the Road — in only three weeks, man!”), but as Moïse said, we’d have been happy with Allen Ginsberg — Carlo Marx in On the Road — or even William Burroughs — Old Bull Lee in the novel — or even, if we had to, a distraught Arthur Miller (in room 614, the playwright had cried over Marilyn Monroe after their separation).
In the evenings, we hung out at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, where a young singer with an astonishing voice amazed us. “Oh, man!” Moïse exclaimed, tears of joy running down his cheeks. “This guy is just amazing!” Moïse watched him as if he was admiring himself in a mirror. Bob Dylan and Charlie Moses, they were almost twins — the same bird head with soft, tangled hair, piercing eyes of an unreal steel blue, a narrow nose slightly bent at the end over a small sad mouth. “The Doppelganger,” Moïse was called at the Gaslight. He dressed like his idol Dylan, wore his hair the same way, studied his movements on stage, trying to imitate them when he walked through Greenwich Village. When girls or guys stopped him on the sidewalk, he laughed as he entertained the confusion, just enough time to see in their eyes an admiration he imagined he himself would inspire one day, when he’d be a famous writer. “I’ve got to train, man. I’ve got to learn to be up to it.”
Dana locked herself in her office early in the morning and did not emerge until late at night — endless days spent writing and calling her sister Ethel, begging her to come support her in her moments of anxiety. It was a demanding writing schedule, which she had forced on herself after a catastrophic visit from her publisher, one rainy morning in November 1962.
His name was Burke Cole. An affected little man in a three-piece suit from another time, glasses slipping down his nose.
He’d run, the poor man, and couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
“My God, Burke!” Dana cried. “What’s happened to you? Rosie, take his coat and hat. And bring him water. Water’s fine, Burke? Or would you like something stronger.”
“Water … Water will be fine.”
Dana became nervous suddenly. A bad feeling. In the living room, she poured herself a large glass of vodka and lit a cigarette, her hands trembling.
“Wha
t’s going on, Burke? You don’t want to publish me anymore, is that it?”
Burke shook his head, swallowing his water, his wrinkled neck shivering at every mouthful.
“So why are you here?”
He took a deep breath and announced that a certain Betty Friedan was about to publish a feminist book that was going to cause a stir.
Dana blanched. “You think I don’t have what it takes, is that it?”
Once again, Burke shook his head and put on an apologetic air, “We need to advance the publication date for The Next War. To avoid Friedan getting all the attention. We need to publish at the same time, or a few days apart.”
Dana wasn’t sure she had heard correctly, or understood. She said nothing.
“Dana, do you understand me?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“You’ve got three months.”
“Impossible! I’ll never be ready!”
“We don’t have a choice, Dana.”
“We! We! How dare you speak of we! We’re not talking about you, but me! And I’m telling you I’ll never make it!”
Burke got up, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Dana. But I know you. I know you’re up to the task.”
Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in February 1963. Two days before it came out, I found Dana in a state of panic at Harperley Hall, her sister Ethel with her, trying to calm her down. On the living room table, a book Burke had delivered to her, wrapped in hastily torn brown paper. Dana was gesticulating, circling the table, casting angry glances in the book’s direction, a fierce beast before her prey, resolved not to let it off easy.
Métis Beach Page 13