Constance (2 page)

—I’m serving, I said. Get them to the table.

We’d already filed into the dining room and sat down when we heard her at the door. I asked Ed to please let her in. Then we heard her stilettos tapping smartly across the hall floor. She stared with surprise at the assembled company.

—Christ, am I late? she cried hoarsely. Then her eyes grew wide. There was a
fire
, she said.

She was in a low-cut red cocktail dress that clung to her ample figure, and with her blonde thatch piled up on top in a sort of leaky beehive, and in those heels, she stood about six feet tall. She worked her way around the table, bending to shake the hand of each of the guests in turn, and being not withholding with the cleavage. Ellen Taussig, so demure, cast a glance in my direction but Iris was charming when she reached her. She said she’d heard so much about her.

—My dear, said Ellen, was it yourself that caught fire?

Iris stared at her and for a second or two an odd silence filled the dining room. She really was very young. Somewhere in the street a man shouted an obscenity. Then Iris realized that this elegant and dignified woman was making a joke. She lifted her head and loosed off a scream of laughter that sounded to me like nothing so much as a lot of empty bottles being smashed in a fireplace. They all joined in, even Ellen was infected with Iris’s laughter. It was kind of hysterical there for a while. What a success she was.

I don’t know why I started thinking about Harriet’s death that night. It was always painful to remember her last months. I was twelve when she got sick and she wasn’t so old after all, she was only thirty-seven. I remember being angry with her and at the same time I knew enough not to show it. I think she
understood. Daddy was less able to cope with her illness than I was. He was a doctor. He’d seen cancer before and he knew the end of the story. Cancer is cancer, he once said, and he said it with such cold finality it made me shiver. There was no remission. It was a lump on her lung and she must have been in pain for some time before she told anyone about it. Poor Harriet. She was a stoic, Daddy said. In the eyes of the child I then was she became ethereal; there was little I couldn’t romanticize in those days. I tried not to be sad in her presence, that was the hardest thing. But when I was sad I gave her at least the gratification of consoling me. I think she needed that. So I provided her with an opportunity to be useful.

She hated being looked after. When she was in the hospital she seemed smaller and sicker than she ever did at home because at home she had some influence over the household. Mildred Knapp was coming in every day and the pair of them would consult on domestic matters.

The funeral was dreadful. I had charge of Iris or I’d have fallen apart. Daddy fell apart. Back at the house people were milling about. Mildred had made sandwiches. There were drinks. I was very distraught. But the adults seemed to think it was some kind of a cocktail party. At one point I heard one of our neighbors say to another that the poor doctor “didn’t know what hit him.” I had an extreme reaction to those words. I had to leave the room. There was a bathroom under the front stairs, a dank little lavatory with noisy pipes where I often went to read or just think, with the door locked. I threw up in the toilet. I heard it again:
He didn’t know what hit him.
I’d heard it before, perhaps in a dream. I sat there for a long time with my head in my hands.

It passed off soon enough. I recovered, more or less, and life went on. The next time it happened I thought somebody was talking to me but there was nobody in the room. It came as a shock to realize it was in my head. I didn’t tell anybody else about it. But I never thought I was going mad. It was just a bad memory.

One night in New York Iris asked me if I remembered the day Harriet died. It wasn’t an easy question. I’d boxed up my memories of those last weeks and secured them in a room in my mind I tried never to enter if I could help it. I knew I was watching her die and one time I asked Daddy when it was going to happen. I remember how clinical he was, how very cold.

—A few more days, he said. A very few.

I hadn’t realized it would be so soon. It was heartbreaking. You didn’t have to be an impressionable young girl of strong imaginative tendency to quaff the brimming cup of pathos in those words! I began to want her suffering to end. I wanted her to die and I felt guilty for wanting it. But how merciful it would be if she slipped away, or if I quietly ended her life for her, just covered her face with a pillow and pressed down hard for five minutes. I was sure that was what she wanted. I hated how thin she’d become, nothing but bones, and her dim, drugged eyes gazing out at me, and always that horrid sweet smell of decay in the room. Her hand like a claw rising from the counterpane, clutching at me when I drew near—

I couldn’t say this to Iris. She was like Harriet, she had a big heart. She was an open book. Nobody said she wasn’t a proper person. I remember telling her about the sadness of those days, and Daddy saying that death was a good thing if it brought an end to suffering. Just a sort of sleep, he said. Nothing about an afterlife. He was always a godless man.

—You know we all thought she was by herself when she died? said Iris.

I did. There were times when nobody was in the room with her and that was when it happened. Daddy went in a few minutes later and discovered the body. I remember Mildred Knapp telling us in the kitchen later that day as we sat staring into our teacups that she chose to go when she was alone. She said her husband, Walter, went that way. Then she clapped her hand to her mouth.

I never forgot how Mildred’s hand flew to her mouth when she said the name of her late husband. Walter. Walter Knapp. She’d never mentioned him before. We hadn’t thought of Mildred having a
husband
, sour old Mildred. It made a strong impression on Iris too.

—You get to choose? she whispered.

—Sometimes, said Mildred. If you’re lucky.

Harriet’s death was in the end a relief but it took Daddy a long time to get over it. I realized later he felt bad that he wasn’t with her at the end, to ease the pain of her departure. All this was in my mind as Iris told me she wasn’t alone.

—What are you saying?

—I was with her.

I was shocked. She told me she’d gone into the bedroom and Harriet was gasping as though she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs. Iris thought she should go get Daddy but Harriet wanted her to stay with her. So Iris got in bed with her and held her hand. Then she died.

—How did you know?

—Her fingers went limp and it got real quiet.

—What did you do?

—After a bit I went away.

—Why didn’t you tell anyone?

—I thought I’d get in trouble.

We stared at each other for a second. Then we burst out laughing. How we howled, oh, gales of mirth. We couldn’t help it. Iris had never told anybody until she told me, that’s how close we were. But at the same time I felt resentful. It was I who should have been with her at the end.

So after Iris had her great success at the dinner Sidney gave in her honor I asked her please to show me the hotel where she worked. I was trying to look out for her. This was what Harriet had wanted me to do, for all I knew it was a mother’s dying wish. It was dusk and we were standing on the sidewalk in front of a brownstone on the corner of West Thirty-third not far from Penn Station. In the sky over Jersey I glimpsed a few smears of rusty sunset. There were black clouds overhead. I felt uneasy. The last of the light burnished the windows of the tenements opposite and made the fire escapes gleam. There was an empty lot just down the block with a chain-link fence around it. Some young men stood around, aimless and smoking. They kept looking at us. I didn’t like it. Iris told me it wasn’t so bad inside.

—You don’t say.

Wide stone steps with brass handrails ascended to a door overhung by a canopy embossed with the hotel’s crest. Pigeons roosted on the ledge above. As we mounted the steps they fluttered off into the gloom. We were greeted by a black man in a frayed gray uniform with scarlet piping. He welcomed us to the Dunmore Hotel. He greeted Iris by name.

—Hi, Simon, she said, this is my big sis.

She then took from her purse a pair of spectacles with heavy black frames and put them on. They transformed her completely. She looked like an intellectual!

—Don’t look at me like that, she said, I need them.

We entered a lobby with a tiled floor and pots of dusty ferns. Old leather armchairs and couches were grouped around low tables. The place was shabby, but a vestige of gentility still clung to it, and I imagined lonely salesmen checking in with their suitcases full of samples, then slipping out to buy a mickey of rye or whatever. By the reception desk a broad carpeted staircase ascended to the floors above. I discovered then, for I heard him, that the Dunmore boasted a pianist. Apparently he performed nightly in the cocktail lounge. His name was Eddie Castrol and Iris was eager that I meet him. I wanted to know why.

—Are you going to get mad at me?

—It depends what you’re going to say.

Already my heart was sinking. Then she was telling me that she’d gotten involved with this man. That was why she wanted me to meet him. I told her I was going straight home unless she told me who he was. I was very firm about it. So we sat in the lobby for half an hour and she told me that this time it was the real thing.

—Oh, is it? I said.

She led me through to the lounge. It was a large gloomy room with scattered tables, a small dance floor, and a bar. The few customers sat alone or in huddled whispering couples. Lamps in scalloped shades gave out a muted yellowy glow. The atmosphere was strange and sad and vaguely dreamlike, and made more so by the presence of a man in a shabby tuxedo sitting at
a concert grand on the far side of the room. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He was playing something I couldn’t identify. It was oddly disconnected, spiky somehow.
Syncopated.
I am acutely sensitive to music. I am acutely sensitive to all sound.

—Doesn’t he remind you of Daddy? whispered Iris.

He did not! It was alarming that Iris should think he did. She showed me to a booth, then signaled the waitress and stood a moment gazing at Eddie Castrol through her ridiculous spectacles. He was grinning at us now. Iris walked off. I ordered a martini. Again I looked over at this man who reminded my sister of Daddy. His skin was like parchment, bleached white in the spotlight’s glare, but he could play piano all right.

He was aware of my eyes on him. He leaned forward, head down, cigarette between his lips, poking at the keys like a bird digging worms, and shifted into of all things
Moon River
. Nobody else was listening. He played it very slow and moody. Too sentimental for me.

I drifted into a reverie. I saw my sister in the arms of this lizardy man. I imagined him feasting on her plump soft heavy body like some kind of animal. It was a disquieting thought. He ended the set before she came back and with some abruptness stood up from the piano and crossed the room to thin applause. He had my full attention now. I lit a cigarette, it was that kind of a night. He slid smoothly into the booth beside me and introduced himself. He then turned toward the bar.

—Where’s that girl gone now?

It was the waitress he wanted. He grinned at me over his cigarette. He then made short work of a large gin and called for another. Lush, I thought. He swallowed gin like it was water.
He leaned in and confided that he wouldn’t be here if the money wasn’t so good.

I turned away.

—Don’t embarrass me, I said.

I was cold to him. I had nothing but disdain for this seedy man and this crummy joint my sister worked in. If it hadn’t been for her I’d have walked out. He lifted his hands as though to say: So what are we to talk about? And I thought: Yes, what
are
we to talk about?

—Iris told me you write music.

I was making conversation, nothing more. He pursed his lips as though he were about to kiss something and gazed at his gin with lifted eyebrows. Was it such a complicated question?

—Yeah, I write stuff, he said at last.

—
Stuff?
I said. I reached for another cigarette. I was not at ease. I suspected that the jagged thing he’d been playing when I came in was his stuff. I edit stuff, I said, stuff that others write. You think your stuff’s like my stuff or is my stuff different stuff?

He lit my cigarette then dropped his eyes but there it was, I saw it again, that bent grin of his. I’d amused him. I hadn’t meant to, but I was gratified all the same.

—You want to talk about it? I said.

He was from Miami. His father introduced him to chamber music when he was seven years old. He’d gotten into the Juilliard School but he didn’t last long. I asked him why and he said he could go faster on his own. I laughed a little. I didn’t believe a word of it.

—So tell me something, I said.

—Sure.

—What are you doing in this dump?

I caught him by surprise. I got a bark of laughter out of him. He laid his hands flat on the table. He had the thinnest, most spidery fingers I’d ever seen, yellow at the tips. Perhaps that’s why he reminded Iris of Daddy.

—Dump is right. I’m only here for your sister.

He knew it wasn’t true and so did I. He needed the money, pitiful though it surely was. But I played along.

—You’d do that for Iris? She’s only here for you.

—She thinks we have a future.

He gazed straight at me as he lit another cigarette.

—Don’t you?

—Oh, come on, baby. You know my situation.

—I know you’re married. Baby.

He wasn’t abashed at all. Clearly he’d decided there was no point being anything other than straight with me. He drank off his gin and leaned in toward me and there was something of the shark in his expression now.

—And you? he said.

He had both elbows on the table. He was grinning. My glass was empty. He was a lanky loose-jointed man and his hair was oily. There were webs of tiny lines spreading across his cheekbones from the corners of his narrow black eyes. I looked around for the waitress, also for Iris returning. I’d forgotten about her. I felt a little sick. I told him that yes, I was married.