The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (11 page)

Yes, Lily Wayland had abandoned the stage, but she had tried for years to take it up again, and always, incomprehensibly, without success. She made the dreadful effort every year. Each fall, accompanied by her insolent, charming airs, she would flippantly, but with a good deal of inward desperation, try to get a part in a play. Somehow, though, her clever insolence fatigued others; her plausible, mocking air was oddly unprofessional; she seemed, in spite of everything, an amateur.

Mother and daughter had always lived in New York. They had had “very little money” for such a long time that it was difficult to imagine them in any other condition. Adele went to Smith College, as her mother had, but Lily had gone there with a good allowance and a trunk of new clothes and Adele went on a scholarship. Adele worked very hard, pushed herself to exhaustion, had high standards, and, like her mother, was a bit insolent and amateurish, in spite of her labors. After Smith College, Adele took an advanced degree in fine arts at New York University. “You are terribly good-looking, lamb,” her mother told her once. “The fact that you feel the need for
advanced degrees
is shocking — one of those bad side effects of a good thing, just as skin rashes pop out after penicillin.”

“I don’t feel the need as a spiritual thing but merely to get a job,” Adele protested.

“And after your tremendous work and training, your salary will most likely never be great. Pity. I should love you to have scads of money.” Lily Wayland missed the theatrical wages that somehow should have been hers and were not. When she thought of work, she thought of fascinating paychecks — of “a five-hundred-per-week minimum.”

Lily was very much liked by her friends. They were always doing things for her: Esther Collingwood took her abroad for a glorious winter; Jeannette Dodge Muir insisted that Lily spend her summers in the lovely Muir house at Nantucket; Madeline Patterson gave her fur coats in excellent condition, and suits from Hattie Carnegie. Adele Wayland was just as handsome as her mother. She was slim, had fine legs, wore pumps with high heels, and had soft brown hair, trimmed once a month by an expensive hairdresser but otherwise washed and coaxed by her own hand. Her face was pale and her eyes were large; in her beauty there was a haggard aspect, as of some splendid thing suffering from overwork. Indeed, Adele’s life could accurately be termed “hard.” She and her mother were inscrutable facts of social history, a mongrel blend of genuine deprivation and genuine loftiness of manner, training, and expectation. Adele’s education had been won by the fiercest exertions. Since her fourteenth year, she had annually endured, like a politician standing for reelection, the anxious petitioning for a scholarship, the exhausting months of hope and despair while she waited for the announcement that would decide her fate, tell her what to expect the following September. And when, at last, her scholarship was safely awarded and the school year began, she had to labor unceasingly for grades, for favor, for recommendations, for honors. She competed, she wrote outlines for projects, she chose fields and learned languages, she made herself liked by faculty wives, she searched hungrily for sinecures — extra jobs where you could catch a nap and still get paid by the hour. Even her vacations were a contest — just one more application form to be filled in. She went about getting invited to the summer home of some prosperous schoolmate with all the conscientiousness and studiousness at her command.

During her years at New York University, Adele had had quite a few beaux and one painful love affair. She was beautiful, but she was also intense and harassed. She preferred married men; they were terribly kind and nice to her, looking upon her as a charming and unexpected dividend. The men had their wives, and Adele had her dissertation on van Eyck, a project to which she was committed, and with which she was helplessly and anxiously involved, just as the men were with their wives. When her married lover, Harry, spoke of getting a divorce, Adele was miserable and, with great pain to herself, had to give up the affair. She was much too tired to bear the moral anguish of a divorce; there was no room in her heart for the emotional greatness poor Harry suddenly demanded of her.

Adele wished to become known by her own efforts. She dreamed of important jobs, of reviewing for the papers and journals, of writing original monographs. And yet, even as she held these dreams, she was aware of the steady diminution of her ambitions and hopes. She had given so much in her early years that the spurt of wild energy she would need in order to do something distinguished after her years of schooling was simply not there. She feared that she had used herself up in the preparation and had no freshness left for the genuine moment. And here she was at last, her doctorate in her hand, with a fellowship for a year abroad to continue her study of Flemish altar painting.

When her mother’s friend Madeline Patterson learned of the trip abroad, she expressed the belief that Adele might, in Europe, aim at the most chic and wealthy international set.

“Are you mad?” Adele said “I’ll be in Flanders, in Ghent, studying in the churches.”

“In Ghent!” Madeline said with a shiver. “My dear, I’m afraid there are no fascinating playboys there.”

Adele set out for Europe in a low state. Now that her formal studies were completed, she did not feel relieved but as if she had to bear in some mysterious way the accumulated fatigue of her school years. She seemed to be sagging under the weight of her enormous efforts, her degrees and fellowships, her thesis on van Eyck, her nightmares before her oral examination, her dozens and dozens of requests for recommendation. Everything she knew, everything she was, seemed to have been bought with her very blood. It seemed to her impossible that she was only twenty-four. In this worn-down mood of the first days on the boat, Adele met Matt McGraw. At that moment, everything except lying about on the sundeck was beyond her; there was no future, no New York, no work, and no ambition. Even her mother, happily resting at Jeannette Muir’s place in Nantucket, was forgotten.

Matt was a pleasant, brassy man, twice divorced, with one child by each former wife, a fifteen-year period of heavy drinking on his record, four years of Alcoholics Anonymous to his credit, and six or seven different advertising firms as his former employers. He was forty-three, of a character, and even of an appearance, somewhat perplexing, because of the mixture of the ordinary and the unstable. While he looked to be hearty, energetic, and typical, this appearance was much questioned by the fact that he had previously been a drinker. He was loud, generous, and rather complacent, and yet he had all the uncertainty and disorganization of his history to account for. The past year had been a successful one for his agency. Matt had money in the bank and went about all pink-cheeked, plump, and loudly optimistic, his very flesh revealing his personal and the national prosperity. “My alimony’s paid, my boys didn’t want to see their old dad nearly as much as they wanted to go to camp, and so I’m pleasuring myself with the delights of foreign travel.”

Adele winced just a bit at Matt’s conversation, but still she did not want to be cold to him. Her inclination was to smile and to sit back comfortably in her deck chair. I suppose he’s awful, but he is good fun and I don’t care, she concluded with some wistfulness. There were many men on the boat more attractive than Matt and hardly any women more beautiful than Adele, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone she would need to be clever and fascinating for. She found herself smiling at Matt’s jokes, hardly minding his loud barroom manner or his fearlessness about a repeated gag. In the bar, Matt would order an old-fashioned for Adele and an orangeade for himself, and take happy and audible recognition of the mistake the waiter invariably made when he placed the drinks before them. Matt liked a world of familiar mistakes and well-worn refrains; without a touch of apology he gave “Bottoms up” toasts and uttered “See you in the funny papers” good nights.

After spending an evening with Matt, Adele would go to her cabin and sleep deeply and peacefully. When she awakened in the morning, she would think of him and smile a bit patronizingly and then remember how pleasant it would be to have Matt on hand in Paris, how wonderful not to be alone. She could put off calling up the list of names she carried in her purse; they were names of people she didn’t know but from whom some unspecified yet necessary “help” might be expected — help in getting around, help in meeting other useful people, getting free dinners, and making good connections.

Matt was loud and noticeable, and yet there was an unmistakable humbleness about him. Very often a deep and humble admiration for some rare person or place could be seen upon his mobile pink features. There was also in his nature a well of sentimentality, very deep, very urban, very knowing, in its fashion; this sentimentality mixed like a bland oil with the vinegar of his breezy but harmless vulgarity. It was of a peculiar sort; it came from the new world Matt inhabited, and was the same kind of tender feeling one might expect to find in a talented film director, in an actress, in newspaper people. Matt was no Dodsworth or Babbitt; he was a creation all fresh and new and recently seasoned. If one mentioned Bach to him, he was not hostile or bored; instead, a look of imminent tears would spread over his face. Perhaps he could not have named a loved piece of music or remembered a great experience connected with the work of Bach; nevertheless, an immeasurable respect for the composer’s name and his immense and lasting fame would seize Matt and move him profoundly, like a glimpse of eternity. “Ah, terrific, terrific,” he would say in a whisper, his voice choking.

Matt was booked for the Crillon in Paris. The costly obvious had a power, like the power of drugs, over his spirit; compelled, elated, he moved helplessly under the shadow of this overwhelming need. “Even when I’m spending my own dough, I end up at expense-account joints. Occupational disease...None of those Left Bank attics for your Uncle Mattie.” He liked, with an abandon mystifying but marvelous to behold, to do everything at once, lay it on, and display without shame his greed for experience and his appalling generosity.

On their first evening in Paris, Matt decided they would dine at La Tour d’Argent. But this was not sufficient. On the way to the restaurant, a large bottle of Shalimar was produced, which Adele acknowledged with a superior smile. (She was to learn that Matt could not resist making offerings of this sort, but he made them with a fierce and unforgettable joy, with a noble recklessness, with pleading, or with a somewhat humble and sighing simplicity.) Adele that night was powerless to alter her superior smile of acceptance, for it was only in this manner that she could accept what she felt such a sudden and unaccountable desire to have. And then Matt laughed and said, “I don’t want to lose my standing as a Madison Avenue parvenu. The largest bottle of perfume I could find and the one restaurant every hick in Paducah has heard about.”

“You are very clever, Matt,” Adele said, touching his hand.

The next evening, he taxied to her Left Bank hotel with a red satin evening coat from Dior under his arm. Ashamed, greedy, horrified as she was, Adele took great pleasure in the coat and wore it that very night, over her black cotton dress from Lord & Taylor. “How mean of you to tempt me with gifts! It isn’t fair to show me up so miserably as a gold digger. And the worst of it is that you aren’t rich. I haven’t even that excuse.”

“I ain’t rich, but I’m awful sweet,” Matt said, pecking her cheek.

Even though he was plump, and rather breathless after rushing about Paris all day, Matt was genuinely energetic in spirit. He seemed never to need sleep, never to grow weary of crowds and public places, of making plans, of giving and giving. He observed mealtimes as promptly and elaborately as a dowager, and for less formal hours he took Adele to cocktail rooms chosen from his black address book, just as if he were still roaming about the East Side of New York with one of his clients. And sometimes, late in the evening, when he had taken Adele back to his room at the Crillon, he would look at her, his pale eyes blinking rapidly, and say, “What luck, what wonderful luck for an old dog like me to be here with you — with a lovely, wonderful girl!”

“It is I who have had the luck,” Adele replied to this one night, in a quiet, sad voice. “How nice you’ve been.”

“I’ve fallen like the proverbial ton of bricks. You know that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know
what
I know,” Adele said, putting her hand over her eyes.

When he suggested they hire a car and drive to Monte Carlo for a week, she said, “No, I can’t, I can’t! But of course I will! How I long to see Monte Carlo and how I hate myself for it!”

“Don’t hate yourself, honey,” Matt said. “After you’ve seen all the swank places from here to Siam, you can outgrow them and go in for quiet little unspoiled treasures.”

They had a glorious time in Monte Carlo, staying in a suite at the Hôtel de Paris, playing roulette at the casino, and ordering champagne for Adele at midnight. As they whipped along in their Citroën, Adele would sometimes think with a flash of terror, What am I doing? Where am I? Who am I? She did not feel at all like the beautiful, promising scholar she was, like the daughter of her mother, like the sum of her achievements; instead, she felt at one with all the blondes wearing white sheaths and mink stoles who were also whizzing along the highways of the Riviera, accompanied by men from advertising agencies who wore, as Matt did, nylon shirts, brown straw hats with plaid bands, and, for the beach, bathing trunks with sunflower designs. Matt did not dress well; everything he bought to adorn himself was of a thrifty, indifferent quality. He liked to spend money on other people, and on luxuries, like the Crillon, that offered the promise of excitement. It was characteristic of Matt that when he was alone in New York, he often dined on a toasted tuna-fish sandwich in a drugstore.

It was not always easy for Adele to decide what Matt felt. He made use of an irony as puzzling and necessary as her mother’s. He might say, puffing out his chest in imitation of some unidentifiable comic, “In my few weeks on foreign soil, think of the stars of radio, screen, and television it has been my privilege to see in the flesh — Gene Tierney, Faye Emerson, Diana Lynn, and Zachary Scott!” And then he would laugh on and on until his face turned red, but without clearly indicating just what he was laughing at.