“Up?”
“No. An artists’ colony.”
Mary hung on to Frank’s arm as they forded the torrential traffic of Houston. Eventually, they came to an averagely blackened industrial building that stood out from the others by virtue of a primitive awning and a string of white fairy lights. They went inside and found waiters fluttering laundered cloths over scrubbed wooden tables, welcoming them with even-teethed smiles as they set down the glasses.
Frank muttered, “Give it a try?”
The food that came was Italian, but seemed to Mary better than the usual scaloppini at Monte’s or the Grand Ticino with their headachey Chianti in straw-covered bottles.
She felt troubled as they ate. “That story by Irwin Shaw. Did you like it?”
“Yeah. Sure. It said something, I guess.”
“Yes, it did. It said that men were incapable of being faithful to one woman because they would always be distracted by these girls on Broadway in their summer dresses.”
“Fifth Avenue, wasn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter. But is that true? Are all men like that?”
“ ‘What a pretty girl. What nice legs,’ ” he quoted.
“That’ll do, Frank.”
There were few other people in the restaurant and it was astonishing to Mary to think that such sleek and glorious wine, that food of a subtlety she had tasted only once before, on honeymoon in the Piazza Navona, could be produced and served with a speedy democratic glee from what was, in effect, the back end of a garage. New Yorkers never seemed to wonder at these discrepancies.
Frank ate with his usual efficiency, the cutlery shuttling back and forth between his hands, the left-handed stab of the fork preceding the vigorous but silent chewing.
“You watching me?”
“How come you never get fat? And how come you’re always hungry?”
Frank drank some wine and put his glass down. “First one, I don’t know. Second one, I guess I’m making up for lost time. If you’ve ever been truly hungry, you never pass up a chance to load up. It’s kind of an instinct.”
“Were you that poor?”
“Sure. But the army was the worst thing. Once we ate a dog.”
“In the Philippines?”
“No, it was in Germany. Near Cologne. We drew lots for which part we’d have. It was a German shepherd bitch. Billy Foy got the ribs, lucky bastard. I got the jaw.”
“What was it like?”
“Pretty good.” Frank pushed his plate away. “Pity the teeth were still in. Have a cigarette. You’ve put me off my lunch now.”
In the early evening they went to the address given them by Frank’s acquaintance in San Remo’s; it was off Cooper Square near the jazz club, in a cold-water flat on the fifth floor of a brick building with padlocked toilets on the landings.
As Frank pushed at the open front door of the apartment, he turned to Mary. “It’s your world, sweetheart. You asked for it.”
Mary’s first, rapidly replaced, impression was that they had surprised some construction workers on the job. Two women in overalls were in conference with a dozen men in blue jeans, pea jackets and navy surplus clothes; their paint-smeared fingers needed only a lunch pail to grasp for the illusion to be complete. They glanced toward Frank and Mary, but only one or two nodded in greeting. With a bottle of Dixie Belle gin he had bought on the way over, Frank mixed them both a drink.
“It’s a long way from the Embassy,” Mary whispered in his ear.
The gathering was a party but also a performance; so long as you had contributed something, no one seemed to mind who came and no one seemed to be in charge. The barfly from San Remo’s who had invited Frank was nowhere to be seen.
When about thirty people had gathered, a man with a corduroy jacket and heavy glasses asked them all to move to the side of the room, as a dance was about to begin.
A woman bound up in muslin, part bride, part mummy, came into the room on pointed toes. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl and her hair was scraped back from her shiny face. A pattering of tabla and maracas began from a corner where a bearded man was sitting cross-legged. The dancer looked about the room, her gaze challenging and bleak; a male performer with wild, curly hair in a soiled dhoti followed her into the center of the room and prostrated himself before her as she pirouetted. Three other women entered in due course and proceeded to make patterns in which the single man seemed imprisoned. Mary found it difficult to take her eyes off his thin legs, which were coated in black hair through which she could see the almost fleshless sinews stretch.
The original female dismissed her handmaidens and pressed herself against invisible objects while the abject male cowered. Her unbound breasts leapt within the muslin as she trailed and arced herself about the room, her bare feet occasionally screeching on the linoleum floor. For all its lack of inhibition and despite the loosening dhoti’s tendency to gape, the dance was unerotic, its severity maintained by the challenging stare of the female principal.
A sequence of chants, in which all five performers joined, brought the first entertainment to an end. The dancers left, unsmiling, to prepare a second piece.
“Eva’s a genius,” said the woman next to Mary, one of those in overalls.
“Sure she’s a genius,” said a bearlike man on her other side. “The other great thing about her is that she owns no underwear. Drives Emilio crazy. Thinks a gust of wind’s gonna catch her some day.”
“Even when she’s dancing—”
“Sure when she’s dancing. Know what they pay for this place? $85.90 a month including utilities. How d’you think they manage that? Hey, you wanna try some of this?”
He held out an oversized homemade cigarette. “I got it from this cat at the Vanguard.”
“I don’t use tea,” said the overalled woman. “You go ahead.”
“I’m all set. You wanna try some?” He was offering the lumpy tube to Mary, who could smell its bonfire-incense smoke.
She had the feeling that if she declined, she would somehow reveal herself to be an impostor, so she held out her hand and placed the damp cardboard end between her lips, where she cautiously inhaled. She puffed twice before handing it back to the bearlike owner, who seemed pleased to be reunited with it. A circle had gathered round them and for the first time Mary found herself included in the party.
“D’you know Jane Freilicher?” the man who had done the introducing asked her, indicating an elegant young woman of European beauty who seemed to have drawn four men to her side. “She’s a genius. They say her pictures lack passion, she can’t make up her mind, but I don’t think so.”
“Another genius,” said Mary. She looked around for Frank and saw him leaning over the phonograph in the corner of the room, a record poised between his palms. “Are you a painter, too?” she said.
“No, I’m a dealer,” he said. “This is Little Helge. You met her? She’s at the Stella Adler School of Acting. She’s very, very talented.”
Little Helge shrugged, but did not demur. “What about you?” she said to Mary, who felt her clothes being rapidly scanned.
“I … I just came with Frank,” she said lightly, nodding toward the corner of the room.
“Sure,” said Little Helge. “But for yourself, what are you doing in New York?”
The group around her was suddenly silent. Their different conversations about Larry Rivers and old Barney Newman, Bill de Kooning and Frank O’Hara had all ended at the same moment; now everyone seemed to want to know what Mary did.
“I … I’m writing a book,” she said.
“Well, that’s swell,” said Eva the principal dancer, who had rejoined the company. “What’s it called?”
“It’s called …” The sound of the record Frank had put on filled the room. Mary looked toward him in panic. “It’s called ‘On Green Dolphin Street,’ ” she said.
Frank had joined the circle standing round her. “I thought it was ‘Stella by Starlight,’ ” he said.
“I c
hanged it,” said Mary. “Anyway, I never could tell the two apart.”
The man with the marijuana laughed, Little Helge turned to speak to someone else and the circle dissolved.
It was nearly ten by the time they left and it was dark as they walked down the Bowery to the corner of Bleecker Street. A doorway bum with boiling red sores on his face was drinking dinner from a brown paper bag. He called out something incoherent, desperate, to Frank, who paused and dropped a quarter into the grasping fingers scorched black with grime.
Up in the apartment Mary put on a record and went over to the couch, where Frank had picked up the newspaper. He opened books and papers no more than halfway, and held them at arm’s length, as though scared of being dazzled by the banality of what he read.
This habit of his was a loved and integral part of her life, Mary thought, but how many books would she actually see him hold? There was a finite number and it was not a large one. She had once felt that what she loved and valued was made eternal or innumerable by her passion for it, but in the last few months—belatedly, perhaps—she had come to recognize that the instances of bliss were numbered as unforgivingly as the streets of the city, and that the edge of the island, once only a dream of explorers, was now in plain view.
In the morning she lay in bed, watching him dress. He did up his belt first, before tucking in the shirt, which seemed to her illogical; Charlie got the shirttails comfortably arranged before buckling up. On the other hand, when Charlie came to fit his tie, he turned his shirt collar up, so that when he folded it down again there were invariably flecks of blood on the tips from where it had touched the shakily shaved underside of his jaw; Frank never lifted the collar, but slotted the tie around it.
He smiled as he felt her watching him. “Gotta look good for the office.” He reached for his jacket. “Can’t you stay till tomorrow? I should be back by six.”
She shook her head. “I can’t leave Charlie on his own.”
The mention of his name deflated her. She loved him as much as ever, more perhaps since she had betrayed him; but he raised the morbid question of time.
Frank’s face looked suddenly exhausted, shot with the fatigue of his life’s exertion. He paused in his dressing.
“What do you want from me, Mary?”
“I want you to prove to me …” she spoke slowly, taking his question literally, “that time doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you say that only what lasts is worthwhile, then nothing is valuable, because everything passes. Isn’t it enough that something should have existed, just once? Don’t you think it continues to exist in some world where the pettiness of time is not so important?”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“I love you so much that I can’t believe that what we feel began only when I met you and will end when I stop seeing you.”
Frank nodded. “That I understand.”
“Therefore the idea of a starting point or an end is in some way mistaken. Therefore, therefore … There is a world outside time, which …” She trailed away.
“Where we can be together but you can still have your other life?”
“Something like that, but not just a convenient solution. An explanation, a way of properly ordering value. An eternity that is more than just time without ending. A place where time runs in a different way.”
Mary could not explain what she meant because her strong beliefs would not form themselves into words. She felt that she could not secure the bliss that should be hers because of some verbal shortcoming, the unwillingness of what she passionately felt to make itself available to words. It was hard to bear.
Later Frank kissed her and gave her the key to the apartment to leave with the super when she went.
She watched him leave the room, heard his footsteps outside, the slide of the lock in the front door of the apartment and the reverberating slam.
Chapter 15
The taxi crept through Hounslow on its way in from London Airport, past the smoky terraces, the wet school playing fields and concrete parades of low modern shops, while overhead a plane dipped in above the power lines. Mary cleared a patch of glass with her hand on the misted window and saw the stationary traffic on the other side of the Bath Road, the commercial lorries and vans, the Rileys, Fords and Singers, fuming at the lights.
Her mother’s imminent death made her see everything as though for the first time. When they reached her parents’ street and Mary looked up to the top window of their house, she could feel the draft about her three-year-old ankles as her mother held her to the glass and pointed to her favorite star. The pressure of the emergency had the effect of stripping time away: the intervening years appeared to have been false or nonexistent.
Her father opened the door and hugged her. For a moment all was well. On the oak floor of the hall the threadbare runner was still in place; the walnut sideboard held its usual load of unread newspapers, orphaned keys and post too dull or intimidating to be opened.
James Kirwan carried his daughter’s case to the bottom of the stairs and motioned her into the kitchen, where he made a pot of tea. Mary felt light-headed, perhaps from the journey, but also, it seemed to her, with a kind of relief. Her father was there, unyieldingly kind, with his adored and reassuring face; on the terrace, through the French doors from the kitchen, the usual assembly of pots and tubs were throwing out their shoots and flowers beneath the metal frame that ran the width of the house with its load of dead vine and dried ivy that was her father’s perennially unsuccessful attempt at a green bower.
Mary took her cup of tea and smiled at him; her pleasure at seeing him again was so great that she began out of habit to adopt the slightly skittish manner that, for a reason neither could remember, had long ago become the norm between them. He was unchanged and continuing; it was going to be all right, Mary thought. In any case, just how ruinous could this thing be? They would manage, they would survive. Death would be … it would not be the end of the world. She gathered herself, patted her father on the hand and stood up.
This was the moment at which she could repay all that they had given her: the indulgences of forty years, their unconditional love. It was good that this effort should be required of her now, when she was strong and clear in her mind, toughened by the demands of motherhood and by the strains of marriage. If her parents’ love had been for any purpose, beyond the spontaneous joy of itself, it must have been to make her whole and balanced, capable of dealing with such natural events. By her resolution she would relieve her mother of any worry about what would happen when she was dead, and take from her father as much of his grief as she could.
Yet as she climbed the stairs to her parents’ bedroom, her strength evaporated. Her legs would barely take her weight; instead of feeling calm and ready to accept the burden, she felt her heart’s affections ripped apart. She thought of Frank, Charlie, Richard and Louisa and felt herself so fragmented that she barely knew what she was doing.
She knocked on the door. Her mother’s voice called out thickly and Mary went in. Elizabeth raised her hand, as though embarrassed for any inconvenience her situation might be causing. Mary leaned over and embraced her, then sat down on the edge of the bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. These drugs are marvelous. Tell me about your flight. Was it on time?”
As Mary described her journey, she registered details of her mother’s appearance. She had lost weight, but she was not unusually pale; her hair was recently washed; she looked no iller than she had on the occasion a few years earlier when she had contracted pleurisy.
Yet she was already dead, given over to the other side; and all the time that Mary talked to her she had the sense that her mother had detached herself. In the way that humans always push forward, because that is the only direction they are adapted to follow, she was reconciled to the crossing. She had left them, and Mary was shocked at her complicity.
Perhaps the exhaust
ion and sleepiness that the illness brought on had helped in some way to ease the separation. When you had flu, Mary thought, you did not care what was happening downstairs in the house, provided that, for the time being, you did not have to join in; perhaps, with the obvious adjustments in proportion, this was the same process.
Until she did die, however, there hung over the time that remained a portentous quality; her mother’s words had a significance beyond their meaning because they might be her last. And while she was still alive death remained defeated, no matter how imminent it was; she was still Elizabeth as she had been for seventy-two years, with no change in her place in the world and in the living affections of those in the house.
They talked about Louisa and Richard, whom Mary would take out from school one day. Mary imitated the children as she spoke, and decorated the story of their holiday in France with details and some exaggerations she knew her mother would enjoy; she could feel her fond maternal gaze on her as she spoke.
When she had finished, Elizabeth squeezed her hand and said, “Happy girl.”
It was, thought Mary, a good beginning, with everyone playing the appropriate and traditional part; it was therefore with a lurching sense of shock that she became aware, after a day or so, that her father was still hoping that her mother would survive. He had either not understood or had refused to accept the prognosis, and once Mary saw that this bewildering hope remained in him she believed she should try, as gently as possible, to disabuse him.
In their transatlantic letters and telephone calls, they had proceeded one step at a time: the next test, the next consultant, everything still open-ended for the time being and likely to end well. Presumably James had clung so tightly to this pattern that he could not believe it when they had reached the end. At dinner one evening Mary asked about his plans for the future, about whether he would stay in the large house alone, and all his answers were provisional. Eventually she saw that he was not going to accept anything until it happened, perhaps not even then, and that the burden of inevitability was for the time being hers alone.
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