by Hugh Hood
Oh, who wants to be somebody’s glamorous relative in New York? What a stupid stereotype, and yet they force her into the mould, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pyle and their charming children, seen at their barbecue pit behind their lovely home at 146 Leafy Hill Lane, Fairfield.
Bob had grinned at her knowingly all weekend. He knows her age because he knows Helen’s, and he never refers to it. But he so plainly thinks that she, with her friends in the agencies and all those writers she knows, is something straight out of La Dolce Vita, and he has such mixed feelings about the sweet good life, that she can meet him on no ground but that of charm. He knows he prefers his own life but feels that hers is the only one. And then they have those children, and she thinks of the poem:
Their small and heightened faces
Like wine-red winter buds;
Their frolic bodies gentle as
Flakes in the air that pass,
Frail as the twirling petal
From the briar of the woods.
Last weekend had been late in the season, late for the pool, but they had sat around and sunned themselves, she and Helen and Bob and Jenny and Michael. She couldn’t take her eyes off the children, those soft round brown tender limbs, the air of terrible innocence and fragility, the trust, the ignorance of charm and strategy. Watching Jenny stretch out a plump leg, touching her toe to the cold water, the movement so supple and so calm, Alexandra had forgotten what she never forgot, that she was Alexandra Ellicott of Signorina, and had surrendered herself to the sweetness of the perception, the unawareness, the piteous drift and sleep of the affections, of the little girl.
Oh God, she had thought angrily, she’ll be going to college in two minutes, a year has become a minute in my scheme of life. Then she forgot about that for a minute (a year) and watched the child play, unaccustomed to the love that flooded her senses, the fierce protective urge that made her leg twitch with the felt physical wish to get up and go and put her arms around the little girl.
Banal situations, chances missed? Not in the least, she has what she has and is, and who speaks of Bob Pyle with bated breath? No transient movement of the affections is worth a lifetime’s work, she concludes, but the disquieting voices rising from the charming park ten floors below blend with her recollections of the late summer Saturday beside the pool, and won’t stay put.
She has never quite heard Bob say anything like this but she can perfectly imagine the puzzled dialogue:
“Why don’t you get married Alix, a nice girl like you? It’s a shame.” Bob admires her, not dishonourably, but really. Helen is younger and almost out of the things between them, things like this at least. And besides, look at all those copies of Signorina they leave lying around on coffee tables, and look at the Gore Vidal manuscript she gave them.
They’ve framed the manuscript with a printed page from Signorina beside it. Nobody else on Leafy Hill Lane has anything like that to display.
“I’m so fond of you Alix, I wish you were settled.”
“Why, Bob, I am settled.”
“You could keep on at Signorina after you were married.”
She is obliged to stifle a giggle. “But I have no intention of getting married.”
“No,” he says gloomily, “I suppose not.” Can he perhaps be thinking forward thirty years? No, that wouldn’t be like Bob, a year limits his foresight, a new coat of paint for the house, a new line of heat controls. And all at once, imagining herself in the midst of this debate, she can feel her drink begin to sweat in her hands, as she sees herself at sixty-five. Get married, get married, the cry clangs in her ears and she reacts courageously. Why should I not have a good long life and a happy retirement though unmarried? Lots of men do.
Or do they or do they?
There is of course terrible Jim Savitt, and she tries to remember whether Helen and Bob know anything about dreadful Jim. Connecticut is full of gossipy playrooms and patios and if you’re seen in one, you’re the prey of all. She remembers Helen making a school-mistressy joke about the Alsop house, the Pantheon, and Greek Revival, a joke nobody saw, but it shows that the Pyles have heard of Middletown. They’ve doubtless married her off to him already, got her up to here in autumn leaves on her matronly patio. A patio of one’s own. Why do you sit on your patio? Patios have become the main arena of the folklore of the upper-middle class, where the assignation begins, where the agon twines around itself. Scene One: ON THE PATIO. Why it’s as confined as A ROOM IN THE PALACE, and much much duller.
She had been sitting mousily on the edge of a flagged patio in West Cornwall, Conn., saying nothing and looking like a receptionist in an inconspicuous dark blue wool, feeling like a veiled searchlight. The trouble with being a celebrities’ celebrity is the impossibility of modesty, you begin to feel as important as they make you out, but no one could possibly be as important as Alexandra Ellicott, that monolith of insideness.
But there she was with one leg of her lawn chair off the stone flags, digging into the soft turf, the chair canting sidewise and threatening at any second to dump her on her side, rolling her down the grassy slope like a ninepin. She kept hitching round in her chair, not wanting to stand and so intrude on the conversation. If she stood up, five men would come over and ask what she wanted, and that was what she did not want. On the other hand, if she fell on her head in the grass she’d draw attention anyway. They were all for some reason talking about Chet Bowles. It appeared to the generous liberal spirit of the group that Chet was a shoo-in for the senatorial nomination. Bill couldn’t command serious support, and the other fellow was a laughable hack.
She laughed, remembering, because the laughable hack has been the sitting senator for three years.
But they had all felt very cheery about Chet, so Alexandra sat on, still as a mouse, while before her and to her right a slender lane, really two narrow parallel dirt tracks, ran down along a line of white-washed rocks over the edge of the valley into a sea of riotous greens and yellows, a puff of foliage that seemed as though you might dive over the edge of the hill to swim in it. Up above and in front of her, as she lifted her half-closed eyes, an enormous hill swelled and rounded in a fecund green curve, all stippled and dotted with subtle accents in green and black, and across this hill slantwise shot the yellow beams, refracted and reunited by hundreds of thousands of softly moving green and yellow leaves and their shadows. In the warm late afternoon summer sun she might almost have drowsed behind her hot eyelids, when a gentle friendly hand took hers, or at least took the glass from her palm as she floated upwards through a wave of threatening sleep.
“Can’t I get you something else, Miss Ellicott?” said this light tenor, slightly husky, voice, and she opened her eyes to a stranger, and then she did IT, damn damn damn wouldn’t she ever be able to stop herself from doing it and she saw instantly that she’d done it again. For she opened her eyes lazily and wide, unveiling eye-whites she knew to be of an astonishing clear shining brightness — they simply were and it wasn’t her fault — and she focussed her splendid lucid gaze on this strange man and gave him all innocently the warmest and friendliest of looks, a look without appeal or enticement, a full shining regard that would seem to understand him and sympathize with him, and take him on his own most hopeful terms, never expecting too much, never making demands, this sheerly fine candid look, and as she did it she heard herself speak, and down to her boots she was familiar with the tone, harmonizing it with the sleepy beauty of the day. All this she did perfectly gratuitously. Her voice wasn’t brittle, nor suggestive of wit, nor of politics and great affairs. It wasn’t a lover’s voice, nor quite an older sister’s, nor a friend of thirty years’ standing, but all these things without any suggestion of commitment or repulsion and she could feel her old familiar sinewy winding movement of attraction winding into the stranger, could feel its pull and thrust, and all this she did involuntarily. Then to save the situation, to cut a little the richness of her gift of self,
she comically angled her chair to one side and whispered her request for help.
“Prop me up on that side, will you?” He seized the back of her chair as she half-stood, and swung it under her, flat and secure on the stone.
She could hear Mel Allen doing the Yankee game inside the house, Mel’s voice snatched out of the swarming air by an aerial sixty feet high, and perhaps she should have been in New York today instead of in Cornwall helping to elect Abe Ribicoff. This stranger in front of her had something to do with all the talk but like herself seemed to want to stand slightly to one side. So she gave him her glass and let him get her another ginger ale, and when he came back they introduced themselves.
“I’m only here because of my expertise,” he said, “I’m a professor of Government at Wesleyan, and my name’s Jim Savitt.”
“Mine is Alexandra Ellicott,” she said with unfeigned simplicity, a quality she’d forced herself to acquire, “people call me ‘Sandy.’”
“Oh I know,” he said eagerly, and she winced. “When I heard you would be here, it made all the difference, because I’ve heard a lot about you.” He waited for her to ask what he’d heard, and then went on. “In my position,” and she winced again more inwardly, “in my position right now, I have to be in the city quite a lot, and Washington sometimes, and I wonder if you might have dinner with me one night? Could you?”
It made her think of Waterbury and it was on the end of her tongue to ask him which of the small grimy Connecticut factory towns he came from, Bristol, East Hartford, Bridgeport, but she let it go. Nobody had offered her entertainment in just this way for a decade and the novelty at once tickled and repelled her.
“Well I’m on East 87th Street,” she said, “and of course I’m in the book.”
How can one be so far IN IN IN that nobody else can appreciate such holiness, or is everybody in the whole status-seeking stinking country forever outside? The Taste Makers, the people who, this very afternoon, are playing the parlour game that in a hundred days television announcers and vulgar bouncing weather girls in Cleveland will be excitedly introducing at their smart parties. In and out. Everybody’s out but me and I’m so far in that I’m invisible.
I don’t know, she thinks, I don’t really really know that I want to be this way.
This bumbling schoolboy Jim Savitt called her three or four weeks after the superb weekend in West Cornwall, and to do his image justice she forever after associated him with long sleepy golden summer afternoons — a thing which can tell powerfully during a courtship — and she sighed, THE COURTSHIP OF ALEXANDRA ELLICOTT. It sounds like VILLETTE or SANDRA BELLONI but to be utterly non-self-deceptive, she has always fancied herself vulgarly as a Meredith heroine, as Sandra or Clara or Diana. What a disgusting way to see oneself as a Meredith heroine, all lightly springing peeping breasts and buttocks seen through too-sheer silk, and always with a fresh spring breeze blowing.
Jim on the other hand sees her as a Roger Angell heroine or as a Vance Packard, and she shivers, sitting there and waiting for him, remembering that first time. It had taken him three or four weeks to get his courage up, and at length he had called in a flourish, a welter, of gaucherie, of which she wouldn’t have supposed a man of his age capable.
“Tonight, goodness me, no, I can’t manage tonight. Isn’t that a shame?”
“It is indeed because, you see, I don’t get in all that often.” Then with innocent manly pride: “I’ve been at the U.N. all afternoon. Maybe we can have lunch in the delegates’ dining room someday.”
“Perhaps we can. Are you going back tonight?”
“No. I’m going on to Chicago for foundation money. I wrote the prospectus and it looks like it might go.”
What kind of writing can terrible old Jim Savitt do? “I’d like to see a copy.”
“Good. I’ll send you one. Can I see you when I get back?”
“Don’t college professors ever do any teaching, I mean, why aren’t you in Middletown most of the time?”
“Oh, I am, I am. Quite a lot of the time anyway, but right now we’re trying to get the Institute rolling.”
She thinks of a song learned in childhood and starts to percolate with mirth:
Rooty-toot-toot, rooty-toot-toot,
We’re the boys from the Institute.
We don’t smoke and we don’t chew
And we don’t go with girls who do.
“I neither smoke nor chew,” she says defensively, but he doesn’t catch the allusion, there are only fifty men in America who would, and damn them anyway, they’re all writers.
“Maybe when I get back?”
“Why not make the appointment now?” she says kindly, and he springs back to lively attention. “Say the fifteenth October?”
“Fine.”
“Seven-thirty?”
“Fine.”
“I know this terrific steakhouse in the Village,” he concludes, and before the shock has worn off the conversation is over and he is on his way to Chicago. A steakhouse in the Village, Hmmmmmm!
Damn it, his geography had been all wrong, it hadn’t really been in the Village at all; there is something pathetic about these people from out of town who try so hard to get their street-names straight. It had been awfully close to Eighth Avenue and 14th Street, with a dismal homosexual bar diagonally opposite, and that’s not the Village.
What a place! A menu with six hundred illustrated items on facing pages, with a lot of little cards clipped to each leaf, with a special Jumbo-sized cocktail, and Chianti bottles hanging here and there. They drank some weird South African wine that tasted like mouthwash, nobody had known her, the headwaiter called her “lady.” The walls had been a curious blond pine — it wasn’t an Italian place nor a Jewish place nor any kind of a place. It was a labyrinthine, brightly lit, superlatively noisy, hole in the wall, that reminded you of a shooting gallery. She never said a word. But after that there was a natural hiatus in the relationship. She could fancy him exclaiming to himself, all the way up the Parkway, that wasn’t you, Sandy, it just wasn’t you. I’ll find a better place, a place that’s YOU.
It took him eighteen months to do it, because he had made up his mind that lady editors his own age were a bit out of his league. “You just took me into camp, Sandy,” he said adoringly, like some kind of a Boy Scout, “took me into camp” indeed, where could he pick up phrases like that? “All the time we were in Jerry’s place, I could see that it didn’t suit you. Funny thing was, it cost like hell.”
“It has to, it’s the only thing that makes the place seem any good, you figure if the cheque is sixty dollars the place must be all right, but that doesn’t prove a thing. All the same, I don’t mean to get involved with the myth about the little restaurant where they chalk l’addition on a slate, it comes to three dollars for two and it’s one of the great restaurants of France. This doesn’t happen here or in France. I remember one night a nice lad took me to one of those places, the cheque was three dollars and that’s what we got, three dollars worth of food. That was when I was first in New York.”
“It will be all right tonight,” he said magnificently, “because we’re going to ‘21’ courtesy of the Governor.”
“What Governor?”
“Ribicoff.”
“I thought you might mean Stevenson.”
“No.”
But the Governor’s name was not quite as magical as it was shortly to become, or else Jim didn’t know a good table from a bad, or else he simply didn’t care, and if their location were the result of the third alternative she might be able to admire him slightly. Only visiting firemen fight over tables.
He must have made some notes from a wine-and-food text — she suspected him of consulting them covertly, perhaps shielding them in his coat sleeve or under the tablecloth, because the meal turned out to be all right. She nodded desultorily now and then to an acquaintance or two, i
n a way that discouraged visitors. Then she set herself to discover what Jim did, besides being a professor. He must have some mark of distinction — she had met him in West Cornwall after all, and while West Cornwall was no great catch it was something, something, and one usually found few professors there, only, once in a great while, MacLeish, and lately somebody called McGeorge Bundy, a name out of the comic strips. Two professors, could she think of a third, besides the oldest inhabitant, and besides Jim? Everyone knew everyone else, it was awful, and they had all at one time or another been panelists on “What’s My Line.”
If you got involved with Connecticut you would sooner or later find yourself sitting in a corner with Arlene Francis, and there was no way of getting around it.
“What happened that time you went to Chicago, it must be nearly two years ago? Did they ever give you any money?”
“Chicago,” he said thoughtfully, “when did I ever say anything about Chicago?”
She giggled inanely at what she was about to say. “Just before our first date.” What a phrase in the mouth of a woman her age. And forty years later there would be old Darby and Joan comfortably in front of their fire, exchanging reminiscences of the titanic days. A magazine has a lifespan of thirty years, after that it’s change your format or go back to the woods. Signorina was reaching its grand climacteric, the zenith of its power and influence, and soon the decline would begin.