Body & Soul (48 page)

"Emma Rawlings," she went on, "under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee for Communist ties. Uncooperative. Known associate of Gerhardt Eisler. Something about an assault-and-battery charge against her too, dropped after three days served in jail."

"Jesus," he said, and then began to feel himself go numb—a contraction of his senses, the room growing dimmer, her voice more distant—as he sensed what was coming.

"Oh, Claude." She rose from the chair, came over, and knelt at his feet. "It said there was no record of your birth, or any marriage, or your father's identity."

"I see."

"And my father said—"

"Let's stop now." Claude touched his head reflexively. "I don't want to hear anymore right now."

"I feel so ashamed," she said, her forehead on his knees.

"Let's just wait for a while."

Nothing more was said, and eventually they went to bed, moving like sleepwalkers. Lady was exhausted and went to sleep as her head hit the pillow. Claude stared at the ceiling, heart pounding, inundated by a swirl of conflicting emotions throwing him this way and that like a leaf in the wind. He tried to calm himself by thinking how well he had done on the tour, but then the worm would move, the old worm of nausea that had been there forever, now reasserting itself. It was not that he thought the question of his possible illegitimacy was all-important—he knew that many great men had been born out of wedlock—but rather a sense of shame that he didn't know the truth. He felt hemmed in by his ignorance. He experienced flashes of fear, even of terror, as the night spun on, that what he did not know about himself (the very state of not knowing) might overpower what he did know, that his identity might be stripped away in the process.

And down there with the worm was a strange desire to embrace the worst. The old man was stupid but he was right: Claude was an impostor, dishonest, shameful, his ignorance an elaborate device to give him the freedom to lie, to pretend he was like everyone else. He writhed in Obromowitz's bed until dawn, when he got up, dressed, and went out.

He ran the few blocks to the old apartment, made a tremendous racket going down the iron stairs, and pounded on the door with his fist. He waited. He kicked the door and pounded again. The very familiarity of his immediate surroundings—the chipped bricks, the drain under his feet, the heavy door only now touched by a stray ray of feeble sunlight, the damp, musky smell, the grime on every surface—all this for some reason infuriated him. He pounded until the door opened and there was Al, in shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, his face puffy with sleep. His jaw dropped in astonishment as Claude pushed past him.

"Where is she?"

Al looked at him for a moment and then called out. "Emma, it's Claude."

Claude watched the bedroom door until it slowly opened and Emma emerged, her large body wrapped in a plaid bathrobe. She did not look at Claude, but first moved to the kitchenette and got behind the counter. Her expression, when she raised her eyes, seemed a mixture of pain, sadness, and a kind of stoic resolve. He had the eerie feeling that she'd known he was coming.

They stood frozen in their places for some time. Claude's heavy breathing gradually subsided.

"No more bullshit, now," he said. "I want the truth."

She sat down on a stool and gazed over his head, silent as Buddha.

Al took a step forward. "How 'bout some coffee, Claude?"

"No." He stared at his mother. "You're going to tell me. I should have made you tell me a long time ago."

"Tell you what?" she said.

"Goddamn it! No more bullshit." He advanced to the counter and slammed down both his fists. She did not flinch, but stared straight ahead, rubbing her upper lip with her forefinger as if working out a puzzle.

"What's done is done," she said.

"Were you married? Or was it like"—he swept his arm to indicate the apartment—"this?"

"I was married."

"Then why ...," he began.

"I married Henry Rawlings in Toronto, Canada, two days before he shipped out."

"Canada!"

"He was Canadian."

"What ... why..." In his surprise and confusion he stumbled over his words. "Why didn't you tell me this? Who was he? Did he have any family? Maybe there are people up there—"

She interrupted him. "I met him in show business. He had no family. It was very quick, and to tell you the truth I didn't know much about him. We were kids. The war was on."

Claude considered this, glancing at her, unwilling to believe he was getting the whole story. Something in her eyes revealed a deep stubbornness, an obduracy. "Well," he said, challenging her, "I can go to Toronto. I can find out who he was and what happened to him, since you don't seem to know or even care."

"That would be a waste of time," she said.

"I've got plenty of time."

She glanced at Al.

Claude jumped. "Leave him out of it! This has nothing to do with him." He turned to see Al, looking thoughtful, nodding quietly while fixing Emma with his eyes. Claude did not know how to interpret this gesture. He swung back to his mother. "There'll be military records."

"The thing is," Emma said, and paused, her hands coming together on the counter, "you've got the name, but I can't really say if he was your father or not." Again she glanced very swiftly at Al. "I don't know. My guess is, he wasn't."

After a moment of paralysis, his mind simply not working, he began a kind of mental free fall, turning and spinning without direction. He sank onto a stool and tried to collect himself.

"You mean ... you mean...," he said.

"I was a showgirl, Claude." There was the faintest catch in her voice. "I can't tell you who your father was."

For a long time the room was silent. Then Al moved forward, slipped behind Emma, giving her a pat on the shoulder as he passed, and began to make coffee. His back was to Claude.

"You knew about this?" Claude asked Al.

"Yeah. We got no secrets."

"Well good for you," Claude said bitterly. "You're a lucky man." He stared at his mother and saw a tear forming in her eye. He wanted to strike her. A ridiculous tear, he thought, a useless, mawkish, cheap tear. What he did was get up and leave without another word.

Claude and Lady holed up in Obromowitz's room for three days. Lady was serious about not going back to her parents' house, though she'd called her mother to tell her she was safe and well, and not to worry. Claude still thought she was being extreme—something made him uneasy, perhaps the abruptness of her decision—but he said nothing directly.

They talked all day. They talked having hamburgers at Prexy's. They talked in the delicatessen buying cornflakes. They talked late into the night, side by side in bed. They were young and preoccupied with the future, with the great open expanse of life that lay ahead of them. Claude was excited with his prospects in music. He wanted to play, but above all now, suddenly he saw it clearly, to compose. There was much work to be done. He confessed that he knew he might be fooling himself, that there was no way to know if he had the talent to write great music, but he was going to try.

Lady revealed a great deal of ambition, but in the abstract. She did not know what she would do, but whatever it was, it would be
real.
She expressed scorn for her mother's volunteer work, scorn for her father's make-believe work, and scorn for what she took to be a retreat
from reality on the part of practically the whole upper class. She confessed that in many ways she had felt like a prisoner most of her life. What she would work
at
involved, in her mind, choosing among what seemed to her an almost infinite number of possibilities. She was quite sure she could do anything she set her mind to, but she was vexed by the fact that choosing one possibility precluded the others.

The decision to get married did not occur in a single moment, but rather emerged gradually. Once, when they had gone on an early morning walk near the Hollifield campus, a bank of heavy fog had swallowed them. They'd leaned on the top rail of a split-rail fence, both of them silent, entranced by the nacreous softness. Suddenly they'd heard hoofbeats, and then, so close they both fell back, there was the massive head and neck of a white horse looming over them, floating in the mist.

Lying in Obromowitz's bed with'Lady's head on his shoulder, Claude said, "Well, it's good I'm going to be making more money now. We're going to need money."

"Money's no problem," she said sleepily.

"Your father and mother...," he began.

"I have money of my own. Lots of it."

He thought this over for a minute. "That's good. As long as we have enough. There's no romance to being poor, I can tell you."

She shifted her head and he could feel the warmth of her breath on his nipple. "My great-grandfather left me a trust fund."

"I know about those. That's how I got the Bechstein," he said.

"Well, there's five million dollars in mine," she said with a yawn. "Can't touch the capital, though. Only the income."

They were married the following week in a civil ceremony at the Municipal Building. There were no guests.

F
IVE YEARS LATER
he awoke to the sound of Lady placing the breakfast tray beside him on the wide bed on her side, which she had vacated as usual an hour or two earlier. Eggs, bacon, toast, tea, and the
New York Times.
He pulled himself up to lean against the headboard while she went over and sat on the window seat, looking out at the tiny garden. Slightly hung over, he rubbed his eyes, what time is it?"

"Ten," she said. "Don't forget you've got the doctor's appointment at eleven-thirty."

"Right." He began to eat. Years ago, when they had first moved into the townhouse, she had brought him breakfast in bed to celebrate their first day of residence. For some reason she had continued the practice, always getting up before him no matter how late they retired. She never sent Esmeralda, the maid, but always brought it herself.

"What did you think of them?" she asked. The previous night they'd had a young poet and his mildly raucous wife to dinner. Everyone had drunk a good deal of wine except Lady.

"Very Harvard."

"He works awfully hard on his charm."

"Hmm." He sipped his tea.

"And he name-drops. I hate that."

"Well." Claude waved his hand. "He's clever anyway. And she was fun."

"Poor thing. He's half Jewish and her parents still give her a hard time."

"Fuck 'em," Claude said.

"Exactly." Lady had not seen her own parents since before her marriage. She occasionally talked to her mother on the telephone. Claude thought he'd seen her father getting into a distant cab on Lexington Avenue a year ago, but he hadn't been sure. It did not seem extraordinary to him that people could live within a mile of one another on the East Side of Manhattan and never bump into each other. In New York City it was possible—indeed, it required no particular effort—to live privately, to choose, if one was rich, precisely how much of the outside world one wanted to deal with. In the case of Lady and Claude, that was not very much.

For Lady the house was a protected oasis of domesticity, safety, and stasis. From it—especially in the first years—she had planned her careful forays outside. The committee to re-elect the junior senator. Assistant executive director of the Prison Commission. Assistant stage manager of a small off-Broadway production. She had worked in publishing, law, politics, and photography, always getting paid (no matter how little) and always leaving after a few months. These jobs were in the nature of experiments. A testing of the waters. After each she would repair to the house. Claude thought it slightly odd, whether she was working or during one of the increasingly long periods of not working, that she had never invited to the house anyone with whom she had been professionally involved. The house was off limits to the people she'd worked with, while at the same time open to those who had worked with Claude. He'd thought this might be an expression of extreme modesty on her part, but in truth he was so preoccupied with himself and his music, he didn't give the matter much attention.

Now, as he noticed her attire—the familiar modest dark green suit, white blouse, single strand of pearls—he realized it must be a school day. She taught art appreciation at Spence, her alma mater, twice a week. Her profile caught the gray light from the garden, and he was struck yet again by her beauty. A calmness, a mysterious repose that, paradoxically, he often felt the urge to disturb.

She got up from the window seat. "I'll be back at five," she said, and left the room.

He read the paper for a while, got out of bed, took a shower, and dressed. Gray flannel slacks, a pale yellow Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and a cashmere sport jacket custom made by a tailor on Madison Avenue. As he brushed his hair a snippet of a melodic phrase popped to the front of his mind. Three notes and a passing tone, out of nowhere. He instantly recognized where the phrase wanted to go in the piano piece he was writing. Standing perfectly still, staring at the mirror but seeing nothing, he worked the phrase into the music in his mind, noting with a rush of pleasure how it connected to the other lines, how it solved certain problems, how it sparked the rhythm.

Recently he'd had a talk with Weisfeld about this phenomenon—the sensation of being a receiver, of the stuff arriving as if by cosmic special delivery. It was both tremendously exciting and slightly scary. "It's good, it's good," Weisfeld had said. "Practically everyone describes this. Who cares where it comes from? Let somebody else worry about that. And don't worry about controlling it. When it happens, it happens. Don't force it. Use it"—he held up a finger—"if it's good."

"It always seems good," Claude had said. "Better than anything I could think up myself."

"So?" Weisfeld had shrugged. "What can I tell you?"

Claude put down the hairbrush and went out into the hall, taking the stairs two at a time as he descended one flight and pushed open the door to the music room. He sat down at the Baldwin and went to work, knowing he had only half an hour but unable to resist.