Institute (6 page)

On the third night I turned to misery’s companion, a deck of playing cards, and dealt them out on the cocktail table for a game of solitaire. I had been at it for some time when I heard the freight elevator. I wondered who would be using it at that hour of the night. The elevator stopped at the seventh floor. Then I heard footsteps on the other side of my door. A key clicked in the lock. My heart almost stopped beating. The only people who had ever had keys were my mother before she died, Eliza, the cleaning woman, and Hortense. For some reason, it was my mother I thought of now as the door began to open slowly.

It was Hortense. She closed the door and stood in the foyer, looking at me.

“Well?” she said. “You gave me the keys, didn’t you?”

I went clumping over to her, gathered her in my arms, and kissed her—just once. Then I stood back and said: “O.K., I’m glad. I can’t pretend I’m not. Now suppose you get the hell out.”

“Suppose I
what?”

“You heard me. Get out.”

“Any particular reason?”

“You know why: you don’t shack up for two days with him and then start up with me again. Out. Beat it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“And suppose I don’t want to?”

“Then I’ll throw you out.”

“I don’t believe it. Want to bet?”

“Okay,” I said, grabbing her, “you’re going—
now!”

“And taking the institute with me?”

I was so angry that I had forgotten about the institute. Suddenly a lump came in my throat and my heart skipped a beat. She came close, her lips skinned back from her teeth.

“Dr. Palmer!” she exclaimed as though greatly concerned. “Are you all right? Oh my! You turned the color of chalk. Should I call a physician? Or administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? What do you wish me to do?”

“All right, then, stay.”

“Stay? If I—”

“Please.”

“That’s better. And could we sit down?”

She led the way into the living room where she pushed me into a chair with more strength than I would have thought she had.

“Now!” she went on brightly and cheerily, “
if
I may have your attention, I wish to gloat.” She walked away from me, twitching it, then walked back, twitching everything. “Do you like it? Does it give you ideas? Does it remind you of night before last when you were in bed here, alone, at least as we hope, and I was—But need we go into details? Were you imagining my situation, after the coup you arranged, of a bigger pond to swim in and a place in
Who’s Who in the World?
I hope it caused you no pain imagining how pitiful I looked there in my bed, waiting, whispering things through the door—”

“Goddam it, shut up.”

“No profanity, please. It upsets me.”

“Will you, for Christ’s sake, knock it off?”

“Beautiful gloat, I love you.”

By then it was affecting me as though I had a cramp, and I was all doubled up in the chair. But all of a sudden she folded, collapsing face down on one of the sofas. I let her lie there awhile. Then I went over to see if something was wrong. I couldn’t see that anything was but leaned down when she started to mumble, low and jerky, one or two words at a time. “I thought,” she said, or at least I thought she said, “—it was going to be fun—that I would love it, having my gloat. But it wasn’t fun at all.” And then, after some time: “A gloat’s not a gloat; it’s not any gloat at all if it’s not a gloat.” That made no sense, but then suddenly she cleared it up. Turning over, she burst out: “It has to be
real!
It has to be real, and it’s not.
He didn’t come to me.
He just kissed me and said good night! He was wonderful except for that—had flowers sent over, three beautiful orchids, took me to dinner, said all kinds of lovely things. But he didn’t do what I hoped for—and I don’t have any gloat! Any
real
gloat, at you! I enjoyed torturing you. I guess I did, if I did, torture you, I mean. You had it coming. You certainly did. But—”

“Shut up.”

“Okay, now you know.”

“Where is he now?”

“ ‘Up above the world so high, like a tea tray in the sky.’ What’s that from?”

“Alice in Wonderland.”

“Yes, he’s flying to London, but what’s there? What’s with London to make it a wonderland?”

“You know what I’ve got a good mind to do? Fan your backside till it has blisters on it and looks like two fried egg yolks.”

“O.K., here it is.”

She turned over again, pulled up her skirt, and slid down her pantyhose to give me a full, fair view, and right there on the living room sofa, with half her clothes still on, we resumed our love affair, complete with biting, whispering, and spanking. Afterward, we lay there, holding close. At last she said: “I was close to God. What were you close to?”

“God.”

“I’m hungry.”

I kissed her, pulled on my clothes, and went out to the kitchen to fix a snack. I had just got out eggs, mushrooms, bacon, juice, bread, and coffee when she joined me, wearing a pair of my pajamas with the legs and sleeves turned up and her own shoes with no stockings inside.

“I found this outfit in your bureau drawer,” she said. “Okay to wear it?”

“But of course. Be my guest.”

“What are you giving me?”

“Tomato juice, an omelette, bacon, toast, coffee. This hour of the night, I thought you’d rather have Sanka. I might add that you’re looking at the champion three-egg-and-mushroom-filler-omelette-maker of Prince Georges County, Maryland. I have special, peculiar skills that—”

“I don’t want an omelette.”

“Tell me what you do want, please.”

“I want two eggs sunny-side up, to look as my backside would have if it had gotten what it deserved—so I know, in lieu of a mirror.”

“Sunny-side up, they shall be.”

She gulped down her tomato juice, then I made her the eggs. She ate them neat, saying “You’re supposed to break the yokes, but I love to put them in whole and squash them with my tongue. These are
nice.”
Butter dribbled from the toast onto her chin, and she held it over for me. I said: “Come on, hurry up; that puts ideas in my head.”

“They the only ideas you have?”

“If you know a better one—?”

“I don’t, but not yet, please. Let’s have a polite conversation until my eggs start to digest and ideas come to
my
head.”

“Okay, lead the discussion.”

But for that, we went in the living room. She stretched out on the sofa, yawned, and said: “I feel like a cat that just lapped up the cream.”

“Conversation, please.”

“Lloyd, why don’t we get acquainted?”

“Well? Aren’t we?”

“In a way, yes—in one way, definitely. In other ways, we don’t know each other at all. So all right, I’ll start it off. As I told you, I was born in Chester, of a shipbuilding family, comfortably well off. Public school, then finishing school for three days, high school, Delaware U., then Richard and marriage at nineteen. Then, hostess, hostess, hostess to Richard’s many friends, most of them important, meaning most of them rich. Received and accepted, partly because of my skill as a hostess and partly because of Richard’s money. In school, the boys made passes at me. In college they did, too, and I’m not sure I wasn’t willing. But the passes were pretty clumsy and nothing came from them ... The passes weren’t clumsy; they were fainthearted.
That’s
why I didn’t give in.
Your
pass wasn’t fainthearted. It was what I called it—rape.”

“It was what you wanted, though.”

“You’re damned right, it was what I wanted.”

“Shipbuilding family, you say. How many?”

“Ships? Oh, dozens and dozens.”

“What size family was it?”

“Oh, well, father, mother—my father died. My mother became a registered nurse, and still looks like one.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“One brother who died. Now, how about you?”

“About me, not much to tell. Just a guy who was born in Prince Georges County.”

“Your father—when did he die?”

“When I was ten.”

“And who was
she?
Your mother, I mean.”

“Just a St. Marys County girl. Father a bank cashier in St. Marys City. It was on her mother’s side—my grandmother’s side, that is—that she traced her line back to the
Ark.
I told you about that, I think.”

“Which made her aristocracy?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you’re aristocracy, too?”

“But I don’t do much about it.”

“Did she?”

“No, but it still meant something to her.”

Hortense stared at the picture, then went on. “O.K., so you grew up here where we are, in College Park, is that it?”

“Marlboro, the county seat.”

“Oh. Then you moved—?”

“To College Park, here to this apartment, when I entered college—the university, actually. Then football, post-graduate study, and a Ph.D. for me, and all kinds of investments for her. She wasn’t grasping or avaricious, at least as far as I know; but money just gravitated to her, all the time. She made more than my father ever saw, and he didn’t do too badly. She left me comfortable, even without a job. When she died, it was the worst blow of my life.”

“When was this?”

“Little over a year ago.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“What do you mean,
in love
with her?”

“I mean, did you like to kiss her?”

“Well, she was my mother, wasn’t she?”

“Was it her idea to rip the neck of your jersey?”

“What are you getting at?”

She didn’t answer at once, but stared for several moments. Then she asked: “How many girls have you had?”

“Why—one or two, of course.”

“You were successful with them?”

“Listen, if they want to, they want to, and that being the case, they do. Use your own judgment.”

“How many?”

“No normal guy ever had one before this one now. She’s always the first and only.”

“That’s a very sweet thing to hear you say. How many?”

“Three.”

“And they were? Who was the first one?”

“Little waitress in Ocean City my summer as a lifeguard.”

“Where did you do it with her?”

“On the sand dune up the beach.”

“And the second?”

“A student during my sophomore year at the university.”

“Where did you do it with her?”

“Her family had a beach house on the bay below Annapolis. We would drive down there at night.”

“What did your mother say about her?”

“I don’t think my mother knew about her—not from me, anyway. I never told her.”

“You must have got in quite late.”

“I lived at the fraternity house.”

“Who was number three?”

“A woman quite a lot older than I was, while I was studying for my doctorate. She was a graduate student, too. The subject of marriage came up, but she began getting on my nerves. After she wound up her year, she went back to Chicago and married a guy out there, head of some research bureau.”

“Got on your nerves? How?”

“Does it matter?”

“If I knew how she did, I might manage not to.”

“It was over my dissertation. She didn’t accept the idea I had for it.”

“What was it about?”

“Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

“What was it about them that she wouldn’t accept? We studied them at Delaware. I thought they were wonderful.”

“When I’d worked on them awhile, I got a creepy feeling, as though the words weren’t just words, but a kind of scrim, with someone back of it, talking, someone I could hear but couldn’t see. Suddenly I knew who it was: a boy, a brilliant, gifted boy who was writing these things—not all of them, of course, but the 154 in the Thorpe collection. When I got that far, some mysteries began to clear up. She wouldn’t believe it, though, kept insisting that no boy could have written them. She kept saying, ‘You’ll make a fool of yourself.’ Then things went sour.”

“You make me feel creepy, too.”

I ticked off a few things that tied in with what I thought, and suddenly she asked: “What mysteries?”

“Well, for one, the identity of the ‘Mr. W.H.’ whom Thorpe, the publisher, dedicated the collection to, as ‘the true begetter of these sonnets.’ It has been assumed by all scholars that this was some patron, one of the noble lords Shakespeare knew, and that possibly there was a homosexual relationship there. But if he was talking to himself, if was a youth in love with his own beauty, as revealed to him in his mirror, if this was a not unusual case of teenage narcissism, ‘Mr. W.H.’ might well be Will Himself.”

“Well, I can believe it. What other mysteries?”

“One, mainly. The identity of the ‘Dark Woman’.”

“Oh that’s right.
Her.”

“If these things were the work of a boy who started perhaps at fifteen, and three years had gone by since ‘first your eye I eyed,’ as it says in Sonnet 104, then he’s now nearly eighteen, and a big event is due in his life.”

“What big event?”

“You know. Of course you do.”

“His marriage, you mean?”

“His
shotgun
marriage.”

“Oh, that’s right. She was knocked up, but good.”

“By a funny coincidence, the Dark Woman enters the picture in Sonnet 127: ‘In the old age black was not counted fair—’ ”

“ ‘Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name’—Well, I’ll be damned! It all comes out even!”

“Hortense, you mean you believe it?”

“Why aren’t you writing this up?”

“I
did
write it up. My dissertation’s about it.”

“I mean,
really
write it up.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

I got her to bed, and she lay a long time in my arms. When at last she stirred, she whispered: “I’m sorry, I fell asleep.”

“It makes me happy that you did.”

“Then act happy!”

“There’s a certain preliminary—?”

“Here I come!”

F
OUR DAYS LATER WILMINGTON
rang me. Richard Garrett called to say he was back from London and to ask if I could be at his office the next morning at ten o’clock. I said I could, as I’d been getting ready using the time to good advantage. I’d wound up my academic year, met with my teaching assistants, and turned them over to Dr. Shad well, my department head. Then I had my last class. They didn’t know I was leaving, but I did, and it shook me up. They formed a line to say goodbye for the semester, the boys shaking hands and the girls giving kisses. One of them had spent the whole year showing her legs to me from the front row, and she gave me a kiss, too. I was tempted to ask her name and where she lived, but didn’t. I would hear from her later.