The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (14 page)

His mind, Clara discovered, was nostalgic and remembering. The Murray Hill Hotel, the Lafayette café, the Men’s Bar at the Ritz-Carlton, Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion lighted for the evening, the brownstone Dutch Reformed Church at Forty-eighth Street — the thundering demolition of these beloved New York structures still echoed in his heart. The memory of the recent dead remained with him as if he were keeping a decent period of mourning. As a boy, he had served at the altar of Trinity Church, near Wall Street. “I daresay no one ever goes there nowadays,” he observed, and then added with a tolerant, understanding smile, “Why should they? I understand there are very amusing services on television.”

Clara was elated by these notes, in a stranger, of a sound and practical traditionalism, but the harmony of the composition was somewhat interrupted by the abrupt mention of fantastic, bohemian summers on Cape Cod. The communion rail at Trinity and the chess table at the old Lafayette had not suggested any profession, but now Clara began to wonder if Henry Dean might be a writer or a painter. She had no sooner settled herself in this conviction than her new acquaintance began to talk of Mary Garden, of great performances at the Metropolitan, of splendid concerts at Carnegie.

“His little stories are the most interesting thing about him,” Clara’s friend whispered.

Henry overheard the remark and, with an expression of genuine astonishment, said, “But I never have anything new to say, and so I tell these old anecdotes over and over. Everyone has heard them. It’s all just nonsense — doesn’t mean a thing.”

Clara protested and contradicted with an earnestness she was helpless to control, and he, smiling oddly, replied, “I’m awfully glad I haven’t bored you to death. When I feel shy and wonder what I ought to say, then I talk everyone’s ear off.”

Soon Clara and Henry Dean began to see each other frequently, and Clara got to know more about Henry. He could no more have refused her intense and flattering concern than a dry root could have refused the rain. With disarming modesty and frankness, he supplied the bare and inexplicable conditions of his life. “I’ve had every opportunity,” he explained one night when he had stopped in at Clara’s apartment for a nightcap, “but I’ve never come anywhere near to being a success. I can’t say I’ve exactly killed myself with work and effort, but even if I had, the grim notion persists that things would not have been very different. You energetic people cannot understand the pathos of the lazy man.”

Clara protested vigorously about what she referred to as his “simplifications.” She said, with her own ready frankness, “You are obviously an extraordinary person.” Henry Dean, lighting a cigarette and reciting in his quiet, pleasing voice the brute hibernation in which he chose to spend his life, filled her with a baffled and yet determined love. “It’s not true — this attitude you take toward yourself,” she offered bravely. “Your irony and paradox, your quickness to disown any sort of favorable view — I know all about that kind of thing. It’s usually the biggest lie of all.” Ah, but what is the truth, her heart asked with considerable anxiousness.

After a week or two, they were going regularly to the many good, moderately priced restaurants in New York that Henry Dean knew. “For original research in the two-seventy-five dinner, I bow to no one,” he said jauntily.

During one of these evenings, Clara learned that Henry Dean was the youngest of three sons of a family of some wealth, but that when the parents died, the distribution of these funds had not left any one of the children rich. Henry had a small income; he was therefore poor but never penniless, lucky but not well-off. About his financial affairs he said he felt like one of those humble but smug men in the annuity ads who announce “I am retired on $250 a month!” “You know,” he continued in his insistent manner, “one of those plausible-looking, pleasantly aging photographer’s models who stands in front of his own little house with the pruning shears in one hand and the other arm around his neat, gray-haired, ruffled-aproned wife.”

“Stop! I can’t bear it,” Clara said nervously. “I’m superstitious, or at least I’m discovering myself to be. You say these things and they have mysterious powers — the sort of mood that puts a strawberry mark on a baby’s cheek.” In her mind she clung to the sweeter intervals in Henry’s biography — to Maine vacations as a boy, to his grandfather’s exciting law cases, to his study of the violin for a number of years. The violin had been abandoned in favor of literature. Dean had once translated a novel by Balzac for an American publisher. “A translation long since superseded,” he added quickly. And he had from time to time written “a few other little things.” When Clara at last reached this more fertile plateau, she felt at peace, as if all her faith, love, and respect had been obscurely justified. His bitter, neglectful smile, his denials charmed her all the more.

Henry Dean continued to make an authentic effort to explain himself to Clara. This, indeed, was his great conversational theme — this devastating but endless examination, given in a leisurely, offhand style, of his traumatized spirit. He was as lucid, absorbed, and objective as a doctor describing a case. Truth, courage, and despair, in a desolate equality, were the attributes of his discourse. He said that when he was twenty-eight a kind of darkness had fallen upon him, a thing without apparent cause or definition, but the most real and painful experience of his life. “It is still there, now a thick fog, and again only a light mist.” He could not recover his old energy and happiness, his ambition. He just went on from day to day, enduring his cramped and knotted existence, heavy with a sort of temperamental fatigue and indolence, which were now his, just as his rather dimly lighted gray eyes were his. “The days are always cloudy, but I clear a bit toward evening,” he said. That he was able to go on, to talk, to see people made him more discouraged rather than less. His father had suffered from these depressions; he would be sent away for a time with a nurse and return well, happy, and vigorous. “With me, it is never that bad, alas, and never is there that much recovery. I’m able to command everything useless to me, but I can’t get rid of this genuine stagnation at the core.”

“No, no! Have mercy on me and yourself!” Clara cried. Henry Dean touched her arm affectionately. Most of his time, he said, was spent in reading; he read everything and had animated opinions on a greater variety of subjects than one would think possible for such a retiring man. The paralysis was on the level of action; he had time and strength aplenty for thought.

Henry had lived for ten years in an old hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street, Clara was to learn — one of those places in which many sweet-natured, undemanding, shabbily well-bred-looking men live without noticing they not only have been denied comfort and cheerfulness but are gradually being excluded even from any sort of service beyond that brushing glance by the maid which is called “doing the room.” Henry had one room and an antique bathroom, both of them small and dull, with saffron-colored walls. Each day the rooms were brightened briefly by a pale, dust-filtered sun, which treated the place with the same haste and indifference shown by the chambermaid. In a corner of the room there stood a few personal belongings, as if they were the last loyal friends of the occupant and were not to be alienated by all the neglect in the world. These were a silver cup, a Lautrec poster, a pair of riding boots, and a violin in a scuffed case. Here in this room Henry’s melancholy flourished — moss hidden beneath a clump of leaves. He delayed and delayed, and read and read by the light of a bed lamp, a bright and handsome bit of functional design he had bought for himself. At two in the afternoon, he could be seen in the lobby, shaved, dressed in tweeds, and appearing in a great hurry, because he wished to avoid conversation “so early in the day” with the old lady at the desk.

Henry’s two older brothers, not so handsome as he and both of them ferociously proud and remarkably successful men, loved him exceedingly. Perhaps they loved in Henry the charm they had lacked when they were young, although the odd thing was that after the brothers became successful and were married to beautiful, charming women, they, too, became beautiful and charming. The brothers recognized that Henry was somehow banished, but they saw this condition almost as a choice, and connected it with his having artistic inclinations. In their generous innocence, they were proud of Henry; his thorough differentness from themselves indicated a mixed strain in the family they could well afford. And Henry was easy to love. He could be recalcitrant, ironic, and impractical without losing his sweetness, for this sweet nature had been formed by his discouragement.

About a month after Henry and Clara met, he was attacked by flu, and, to his unutterable pain, Clara descended upon his hotel room, crying out in distress and love, bursting in on him with all the unwelcome energy of her growing passion for Henry Dean. She was shocked by the dinginess and darkness, and also by the fact that the object of her considerable love should be living in such a way. All the domestic arts of the ages that were lacking here — crackling fires, candlelight, crisp sheets and gay trays for the sick — all these seemed to reproach her, as if she had
left
her loved one in this condition rather than
found
him in it. The impression the room made upon her was a powerful one; she looked at it and at Henry with such amazement and determination that he shivered before the gaze of her fine eyes. For a moment, Clara could not speak. Her hands trembled. It was not the room itself that frightened her so much as coming upon it suddenly and without preparation; it was like falling out of the clear sunlight into utter forlornness. It bit into her, chilled her; the bleakness and the dismal quiet seemed to challenge reality — life itself. Clara considered the “real” Henry the man with the anecdotes, the light irony, the possible talents, and everything in her fought against the horrible chill of the room, the drawn blinds, the old newspapers, the unpolished silver cup, the silent violin. These were the work of the Devil. Clara believed, without having phrased it for herself, that the elect, the good, showed themselves as such by cheerfulness, by prosperity, by health and order and advancement; by these blessings God showed his pleasure, and his goodwill toward man.

“Ten years, you poor darling!” she said. The thought of that decade lay upon her painfully, and, shuddering a bit, she took Henry’s hand and told him he must come to her apartment until he was well. He was too sick to protest, even if he had wanted to, and she carried him off to her splendid, light, airy penthouse — a tropical scene, all glass, and plants of the deepest green, with pastel carpets, soft armchairs, striped red, green, and yellow, like beach umbrellas, brass as warm and brightly polished as if heated by a Southern sun, pink-and-white dishes, and bedclothes smelling of cedar. Clara put him in the big bed in her room, and moved into her small spare bedroom.

Henry was enchanted, and felt his life quicken under the warmth and glow of Clara’s care. “If I did not know myself with such desperate accuracy, I should say I was being reborn instead of recovering,” he said in a wan voice the first day he was able to get out of bed. Perhaps he did not find himself reborn, but he did not move away. He stayed. His presence was profoundly altering to the life about him. It was as if a pleasant, mild rainy season had set in in the tropics of the penthouse.

One evening, Clara, made bold by her joy, said to Henry, “I’m very conservative, I suppose, but I wonder if you’d hate the idea of marrying. Me, of course.”

Henry took a pencil out of his pocket and began to make drawings on the white edge of the newspaper he had been reading. “You can’t seriously want to marry me!” he said at last. “It seems such an odd thing for you, or anyone, to want that I’d never have had the courage to suggest it.”

“Well, I do want it,” Clara said.

“Of course it would make me very happy. But if you’re ever sorry, you mustn’t think you have to pity me and stick by it in spite of everything.”

“Why should I pity you?” Clara demanded.

“I’m not much of a catch. I’m sure I’m not the right husband for you.”

Henry had, it turned out, been married before, in his early twenties. His wife, he said, was young and beautiful, and had left him because he was a “slowpoke.” “I think that’s a perfectly sufficient reason. It was like trying to mate a deer and a mole,” he added.

“Who was the deer?” Clara asked.

“I was the mole.”

Clara found it difficult to judge humility in this shape. Henry took such care; he laid waste to his own personality like a farmer with a scythe. But he procrastinated about the marriage. He reminded her that he had failed once and would probably do so again, and yet he did not leave her apartment. In the noon sunlight, in the evening, with a highball in his hand and his reading glasses on, an expression of contentment might sometimes be seen on his face — a look of reprieve from his lonely life. Inertia, too, held him with its usual inexpressible power. He had been picked up by Clara and set down very firmly in her life; he hesitated to move, to disturb the new growth and flowering. Though women had found Henry attractive, none had given him such efficient love as Clara’s. She had swept Henry out into the light, and he stood there exposed and shy but reluctant to move out of the path of this powerful love.

“What on earth could I possibly add to your life?” he asked her once.

“Yourself. I want you,” Clara insisted.

“I couldn’t endure the evenings without you,” he said, “but I didn’t want you to make a mistake. All my hesitation was false.”

They were married quickly and quietly, and flew to Quebec for a three-day honeymoon. Clara was so busy just then that she couldn’t get away for a longer vacation. They returned and began their life. The plants bloomed, the sun shone through the windows, orange juice appeared in silver tumblers, newspapers arrived at the door, white walls were washed and pastel rugs were cleaned without one’s being aware of it. Everything was light and white and of a wonderful freshness. When Clara left the apartment at nine-fifteen in the morning, Henry was still asleep. She was not angry about this, but she was puzzled, and sometimes Henry’s slumbering form would frighten her and she would listen for the sound of his breathing, making sure he was still alive. For some reason, when Clara had closed the door of their apartment she would often think of Henry gazing at her with an affectionate and rather sociological smile and saying, “I’ve never really known a successful businesswoman before.”