The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (13 page)

The romance, of course, did, at last, start to give pain rather than pleasure. “Sooner or later, there is trouble in paradise,” Lily Wayland observed. The bitter moment came suddenly, and its grimness lay in the fact that a decision had to be made. Matt’s office wanted him to go to Dallas. They planned to make him director of a new branch there, and he planned, without hesitation, to accept. “There are acres and acres of cash in Texas,” he said. Not only did he mean to go to his new office, he was much pleased by the thought of it, and he seemed to assume that Adele would go with him.

Adele did not want to go to Texas — not at all. She could not! From the very first moment, she knew it was impossible. If they went to Dallas, she felt — even though Matt had said nothing about it — that they would have to marry; they would rent an apartment, buy furniture, make friends, go to the country club on Saturday evening. But she didn’t want furniture, a Thunderbird, a fur cape to wear to suburban cocktail parties. Her eyes filled with tears when Matt told her of the change in his life. “I cannot do it!” she said immediately. She could not imagine them in their own house. In New York, Matt was possible. His soul had some of the gritty grandeur of the city itself; like a nomad, restlessly seeking, he roamed the midtown plains with all the knowingness of an animal that has found its natural grazing spot. The beauty of Matt’s life was defined by taxis, expense accounts, even by his dingy little flat on East Fifty-second Street. There Matt, the only Matt Adele could imagine, made his cheap bachelor home, which was like his cheap bachelor clothes. In his apartment, his dusty one-and-a-half, there were Coke bottles and streaky highball glasses on the coffee table; the old-fashioned air-conditioner, long since past using, rusted on the windowsill; his towels collected under the washbasin until his once-a-week cleaning woman took them to the Chinese laundry. This was where Matt slept, but his true home was a restaurant, or even, one might say, a taxicab. Not to be going to first nights, small East Side movie houses, bars with good “society pianists,” was unimaginable. Matt, puffy and blond, with his alimony, his sharp-nosed sons who went to military school —
this
Matt, watering the lawn on a Texas Sunday!

One night, Matt admitted, with the persuasiveness of grief in his voice, that he had hated the idea of having Adele for his mistress. He admired her too much, thought her too beautiful and her mother too extraordinary. Phrases like “well bred” and “nice people” came to his lips. “I have felt very guilty, baby,” he said. “Naturally I’ve enjoyed it, for such is the nature of the beast, as they say in the movies, but, honestly, I don’t think that sort of thing is nearly good enough for you. I don’t want to sound like some damn-fool Billy Graham, and yet the truth is, so help me, that it seems a little on the low side, this not being married.”

“No, I can’t! I can’t!” Adele said desperately. “I don’t suppose you will understand it, but I really must stay at the museum. I couldn’t do my work outside the city. Forgive me, Matt!”

“I hate to be beaten by the Old Masters,” Matt said jauntily, but unable to conceal his bottomless disappointment. He tried again, he begged, he hoped for a while. Then he went off to Dallas alone.

Adele and Lily stayed on in New York. Once more they began to invite guests to their apartment for a nice French-casserole-and-green-salad supper, once more they spent the weekends altering dresses, talking ironically, and trying to get brilliant invitations for the following summer. Adele would think of writing a book, or discuss the buying of a new dress, or smile when her mother walked about in costly French shoes given to her by Madeline Patterson, which, she said, “were not wildly comfortable.”

Sometimes Lily would say to her daughter, “Dallas...I suppose for your particular talents it would have been quite the end.” And then she would sigh. Adele could make no answer. She would just lie back disconsolately on the sofa and listen to the radio, or simply rest her eyes. Her mother, sitting across the room with a highball glass in her hand, would shake her head and say, “‘
Povera Butterfly
.’”

1956

Clara Church, although only thirty-three, earned fifteen thousand dollars a year. But it was not this good fortune that gave her an important, confident air; on the contrary, she had started life with just the vigorous, self-reliant sort of temperament that enabled her to earn her fifteen thousand. Clara was tall and handsome and had an ample opinion of herself, which did not, however, pass beyond the reality of the matter. When she thought of her life, her endowments, and her luck, she could face them all with affectionate candor and a tender, rather soothing modesty. She had a rapid, ambitious step and a smooth, alert, prosperous sense of well-being that made each day an interesting and lively experience to go through. Her healthy, athletic narcissism and the pulsings of energy and success gave her a kind of beauty, like that of a splendid oak or maple. About her intellectual accomplishments, her attitude tended toward gravity. She knew the joy of learning new things, just as she knew the joy of her wonderful, springy, brisk nature.

“Technically,” as she liked to put it, she was the food editor of a very successful magazine for women. “That is my title,” she would say in her dignified tones, “but I don’t spend my entire life on four-color illustrations of ham, pineapple, and peas.” Indeed, Clara had made quite an exciting and unusual life for herself. She loved the pamphlet-and-committee world into which her work and her inclinations led her; she was always ready to serve beyond the call of duty — to act as an adviser on minimum diet, child labor, and the changing world of women, and to draw up publicity releases for the aid of war orphans. She had been abroad for the government, spoken at the United Nations, appeared on forums, and produced a number of brochures for her committees. Everything she undertook was accomplished with unfailing seriousness and efficiency; she had sometimes given a whole evening to a judicious weighing and balancing of qualities and limitations before casting her vote for the Most Important Woman of the Year.

Clara also liked the arts, and she had a politician’s memory for names and titles, as well as a number of opinions, which she had arrived at with solemn energy. At a cocktail party, she might say with a thoughtful frown, “Ivy Compton-Burnett...of course, of course. I’m never sure what I truly think of her novels — can’t make up my mind.” Or she might remark about a painter, “I think he exaggerates what started out as an original vision.” These were not mere phrases with Clara but the hard work of her mind. She was independent in spirit and keen for knowledge. Her great charm was her utter subjectivity. When she arrived at a popular opinion, she had
arrived
at it; if she happened to share this opinion with a great many other people, that was merely to be expected. One might have branded her with an iron without getting her to modify a “position.”

Clara’s candor and industry made people respect her, but she was not the sort to be adored by switchboard operators or imitated by young secretaries. The cool, clear gleam in her eyes spoke of her own odd inspiration and devotion, but these were too austere and personal to inspire others. Her relations with her superiors and equals were excellent. Nevertheless, Clara’s attitude toward these persons was mixed and apprehensive, in spite of the unusual correctness of her professional behavior. If there was joy in success, there was anxious responsibility, too, and Clara sometimes feared that the haphazard, indifferent way other people performed their duties might lead to disaster. She would remind herself that her own virtues — punctuality, intelligence, foresight, discretion, and loyalty — were not everything in the world, thus, in a general fashion, trying to place her own talents in the proper order of things. Unfortunately, each day at the office brought nagging little problems and delays; the proper order of things was hardly evident there.

Mrs. Morton, the editor and Clara’s superior, was a sensitive, imprecise, tardy, untidy person, as elusive as the lost scrap of paper upon which she had made an important notation and for which she was always rooting and searching. “I love her — a wonderful, wonderful woman,” Clara would say truthfully about Mrs. Morton, and yet there was no denying that she was a source of anxiety. The lost scraps of paper, ragged at the edges and unintelligibly marked, appeared in Clara’s dreams. Mrs. Morton was all sap and Clara was all bark. The editor wore an expensive, unbecoming hat on the top of her disarranged hair and was vague to the point of mystery. Confronted with the most urgent matters, she did not hesitate to wave her hand and say dreamily, “I’ll think it over,” or “Speak to me in a week or so, dear.” Mrs. Morton’s nature was deeply disruptive and intuitive, but her manner was warm, cooperative, and affable in the extreme. This inconsistency worried Clara. She tried to look at it as a problem that she, rather than Mrs. Morton, had failed to solve — a knotty little puzzle to which there was a simple key if only one knew it.

Before the completion of each issue of the magazine, a frenzy of perfectionism would fall upon Mrs. Morton and she would keep the staff at the office until midnight working on some minor or major alteration in plans O.K.’d days earlier. In the chaos of these late hours, hardly anyone dared to look closely at Mrs. Morton, because she was so peculiarly, madly happy; she abandoned herself utterly to the demon urgings that disarranged, rejected, or criticized. Clara, too, was fearful to behold in these midnight sessions. There was a menacing rigidity in her features and a certain eloquence in her deep, outraged breathing.

Since Clara was born to be happy and busy, she was usually equal to the disappointments and irritations of life even if she was certainly not above them. Crises threatened and tempers stormed; she grasped the rail and held on until the waters calmed. Genuine wretchedness she had never known and could hardly bear to think of. With her, terrible suffering had some of the force and horror of a taboo; it was against nature and degraded the unfortunate one upon whom it fell. Her first “disappointment” was her husband, Arthur Church, whom she had married when she was twenty-three. He was five years older than Clara, a spare man, with generous, extroverted ways, who had a disarming air of knowingness just when he was most befuddled. Arthur was an awkward piece of furniture, which could be neither overlooked nor easily renovated, although Clara had often tried the latter. His law degree from Columbia and his downtown office did not prevent him from reminding Clara of a shoe clerk: he had a pale, amiable, unprofessional manner, and liked gabardine suits of the paler shades and socks of pastel silk, these costumes making him appear — to his wife, at least — like a shoe clerk on a Sunday. Sometimes Clara would gaze at her husband with appalling supplication, dreaming that they might collaborate on a brilliant work of some kind or that she might discover an “ideal” by which Arthur would be made fascinating and distinguished. But nothing could be done with him; he went right on whisking out his colored handkerchiefs and telling pointless anecdotes in a voice of hilarity. He was never without a smile or a genial phrase, and yet he badly lacked a sense of humor. They had good times together when they were alone; then Clara didn’t mind his lack of style, because they were indeed very close to each other — thoroughly known and accepted.

Yes, Arthur adored Clara, but quite suddenly, after more than ten years of marriage and in the same week that Clara had her thirty-fourth birthday, he left her and said he wanted to marry his secretary instead. When Clara heard this, she thought of it only as another piece of social clumsiness on his part and said, “Now, really, Arthur, you are always getting into these unnecessary jams,” as if he had got a bit too chummy with a waiter, rather than with his secretary. But Arthur meant what he said, and it took him hardly more than a week to leave Clara’s life entirely.

For the first time, Clara began to experience real suffering. She was jealous of the secretary; she was lonely and severely humiliated; she saw herself as a discarded, pitiable object, irrevocably cast off not only by Arthur but by the world. At the office, she lied and said she had thought it best to part from Arthur, and she excused herself by remembering that she
had
often thought it best to part from Arthur, even if she hadn’t done so. There was no danger that any of her friends would see the happy man, because he spent his evenings in New Jersey, where his secretary lived with her mother and where, when they were finally married, Arthur bought a five-room house. Clara’s anguish was dreadful. This stunning blow seemed to wound her in every respect; she felt physically disfigured and morally tainted by it. Her appearance actually did deteriorate during the first months of her wretchedness, and at night she came home feeling bruised, sore, and unattractive, and could do nothing except lie about in her robe of orange shantung, her eyes covered with witch-hazel pads. She even quarreled with her maid, who was delighted by the master’s departure and liked nothing better than to have a single business lady to care for.

Clara’s spirits picked up when she at last got the idea that the curse might be broken if she could marry again. Having lost a good deal of confidence, she had in mind an older man — perhaps quite a bit older — and when she walked down the street, her eyes would follow with real interest any portly, prosperous-looking man she met, and she would think, “Quite attractive, such nice eyes — the sort of blue that turns bluer as you get on in years.”

About a year after her divorce, Clara met Henry Dean. He was not of the advanced, consoling age she had promised herself, but, at forty-seven, he had a wonderfully worn and interesting air. He was tall, thin-nosed, good-looking; his clothes were old and well cut, his smile careless and self-deprecating. Even in a corner of a crowded room, this man made an impression with his nicely seedy handsomeness. His was one of those thoroughly civilized images created out of thin noses, modest, intelligent ways, tolerant eyes, and, in this case, some faint hint of undefined impoverishment — an honorable disability. The suggestion of loss and damage appealed mightily to Clara after her pulverizing experience with Arthur. Dean’s charm, his worldliness and ease were (Clara was ashamed to admit that the word kept coming into her thoughts)
aristocratic
— a dispossessed, perhaps an idealistic-minded and disinherited example of the aristocratic. She was enchanted by the weary eye and bony blond face; hope and gratitude rose up in her heart. The meeting with Dean took place at the home of Clara’s oldest friend in New York, who herself had met him only recently and had the idea he had done something unusual, although she was not able to say just what this might be. Dean’s most arresting quality was that he was somehow greater than the sum of his achievements.