Shakespeare's Kitchen (4 page)

Fast forward. Nat’s head lies flat on the white hospital sheet. He is counting the poems he got right—three, four, five in the first book—two in his last. He finished the long poem, but the first line of part three, over which he had that altercation with the editor and had given in, honorably, because he had come to think that she was right, resulted in a skipped beat that continued to trouble Nathan. He persuaded himself again and again that it was all right. Now it twitches his lip.

“Nat?” Nancy leans her face down to him. “What is it?”

“That wasn’t my prize,” Nathan says.

“Of course it was!” Nancy straightens up. “He never did get his $5,000 made out to the wrong name,” she says to Joe Bernstine, who is sitting on the other side of Nat’s bed.

“When all he would have had to do was endorse the wrong name.” Joe Bernstine looks down sadly.

He is sad for me, thinks Nathan.

Are Nat’s teeth smiling between his parted lips? “I wonder . . .”

Nancy and Joe lean down their good faces. “What, Nathan?”

“. . . if I was
the
poet.”

“Which poet?”

“
The.
” Which is now moot, Nat thinks he is saying but might not be making any sound, might no longer be moving his lips to say mooter, mootest.

I
lka, an only child and a refugee from New York, was always asking people how they had met. “Did you meet here, at the Concordance Institute?” she asked in the silence that gaped after Joe and Jenny Bernstine went inside to get the drinks.

“No. I met Alfred at a sandwich bar during a pilots’ strike,” said Alpha Stone, the institute’s acting director. Ilka had spoken with her on the telephone to make arrangements for this interview. Professor Stone turned out to be small, round and smooth. Her husband was large with a very large, shockingly handsome face—a countenance. Ilka found it hard to look at him and looked away, found it hard not to look and looked at him.

It is always interesting to learn how male and female find each other, but that might not be the information for which Ilka foresaw
her most immediate need. “How did all of you meet each other? I mean a new set of friends.”

“Everybody went to school with everybody in Chicago,” said the child who had opened the front door in order, it had seemed to Ilka, to block it with her body and prevent her from coming in. Ilka had rearranged her face to hide a regret at the young girl’s heavy jaw, the unsmiling mouth, and Jenny Bernstine had come and said, “Bethy, go dear. Upstairs, love, and do your homework. Teddy, put the dog out in the yard, please.”

Jenny Bernstine brought the visitor into the foyer. “Your plants look so enthusiastic!” chattered Ilka.

“Aren’t they ugly!” Jenny Bernstine had shaken her head at so much healthy, undistinguished green life. “Bloom! Bloom! Nothing but bloom!” Her foot inched a little potted purple-flowering bush into a shaft of sunlight. “You kind of wish they’d die so you could throw them out.” She frowned at the rubber plant. Its naked stem grew to the ceiling, bent to the right, and ended in three large, highly polished, deeply green leaves. Here came Joe Bernstine, the institute’s founder and president, and led Ilka out onto the covered porch where young Bethy reappeared and stationed herself so that Ilka had to look and talk to the right or left of her head, and the child kept her head in motion.

“How did I meet you?” Alpha Stone asked when Jenny came with the ice and the glasses.

“Graduate school in Chicago.”

“How did you get talking together?” asked Ilka. “Where?” Ilka saw the hand of the beautiful Alfred caressing the edge of the newspaper that lay on the little table by his elbow and she talked faster: “How did you get to be in the same place?”

“I think Winnie brought you over, no?”

“Yes, I think,” said Jenny Bernstine.

Ilka said, “How did you meet Winnie?”

“Leslie picked him up when Winnie’s car broke down—Winnie
had gone to pick up—Joe, what was the name of the Kells expert nobody could remember having invited?”

“Or heard of ever again, nor thought of from that day to this.”

“That’s sad!” said Ilka. “You meet people and afterwards you drop out of each other’s head. That’s terrible.”

“Leslie picked him up and brought him over,” said Jenny Bernstine.

“How did you know Leslie? How did Leslie know Winnie?” asked Ilka, and Alfred Stone picked his paper up and began to read it. He was not a member of the set of Chicago friends, who started remembering.

“Winnie married Edwin’s sister.”

“Dorothy, his half-sister.”

“They met at Amherst.”

“How?” asked Ilka, but the doorbell was ringing. It was Professor Aye, a huge old man with a massive head of white hair in a state of cheerful revolt. He shook Ilka’s hand and said, “Martini please,” and Professor Zee, who said, “Don’t introduce us. Ilka and I had lunch. Scotch and water. Thanks.” Again the bell rang. Joe Bernstine brought the members of the institute onto the porch. Everybody was given a drink while Ilka tried to figure which of them she had met in the course of the day. What was the name of the man with all that black hair, who had been at the breakfast? He was coming over to sit down beside Ilka. He said that in New York, when he got the Columbia Prize for Poetry, they seated him next to that TV actress with more teeth in her mouth than ordinary people. The bank, he added, would not let him deposit his $5,000 check made out to one Nathan
H.
Cone
s
! Here Alpha Stone asked who would be available to meet with Leslie Shakespeare Thursday and what time and Dr. Alfred Stone, who was not connected with the institute, looked at his watch, returned his paper to the little table, and went to sleep.

The discussion of the directorship was a subject on which the
junior candidate could have nothing to say. Ilka held her head at the alert but discreet angle of one attending a conversation that was none of her business unless they stopped having it and interviewed her and she got the job, in which case she probably ought not to hear what they were saying. For a while Ilka enjoyed eavesdropping on a world of whose existence she had known nothing until her arrival in Concordance that morning. But it is hard to keep the mind on dates and arrangements concerning one Leslie Shakespeare with whom one had no history, of whom one knew no stories, in whose existence, since she had never checked it out with her own eyes, Ilka did not know that she could not believe.

Ilka searched for something to entertain her. She practiced telling Jenny Bernstine to her New York friends: Around forty. Against the startling whiteness of Jenny Bernstine’s hair, the skin showed like deepest summer. What sort of animal did that flat-faced, pug-nosed handsomeness remind one of? Not a cat, not a monkey. A pug. Jenny Bernstine, looking with affectionate anxiety around the party on her porch caught Ilka’s eye, got up, came around. She pulled up a chair, reached for Bethy and locked the child between her knees, saying “Search committees!” Jenny Bernstine frowned across the space that separated her from her little, smiling, agile husband who moved among his friends with an air of happiness. Ilka felt at leisure to study, at a remove of inches, the soft topography—lines, mounds, declivities—of Jenny Bernstine’s middle-aged cheek, as tender as if the top layer had been taken away to expose the fine-grained second skin. Jenny said, “We can’t wait for Leslie to take over the directorship. He’s English, you know. They were co-founders, Joe and Leslie. They ran the institute in those first years, as president and director and no one thought which was which. Joe needs to get on with his own work!” Even the conversation of a search committee—at least any one round of it—runs its course and runs out. The silence woke Alfred Stone. Now Professor Zee turned to the candidate
whose heart flipped like a fish inside her chest. Professor Zee asked Ilka if she knew that Winterneet had done a lecture series for them at Concordance the year before his Nobel Prize.

“Ah!” said Ilka.

Jenny Bernstine said, “He lives on the other side of town. We’ll give Ilka our Concordance tour.”

Dr. Alfred Stone looked at his wife and Professor Stone said, “So Thursday is a possibility for everybody?” She got up. Everybody was getting up. At the door the subject of the Thursday meeting with Leslie Shakespeare erupted once more. Alfred Stone beat his thigh with the roll of his newspaper.

 

 

Jenny Bernstine drove. Ilka sat beside her and looked where Joe, in the backseat, pointed. “See that white building?”

Ilka saw several white buildings. She saw the walls and corners of more buildings, all of them more or less white. Ilka said, “Aha?”

“That’s the Highell Student Center,” said Joe. “Over there is the new library that was only finished five years back.”

“Ah!” said Ilka.

“Seven,” said Jenny. “That was after Leslie left.”

“And Winnie got married. You’re right!” said Joe. “It was only finished seven years ago.”

“Dorothy was not a bad poet in her own right,” mused Jenny.

“Which is Dorothy?” asked Ilka.

“Dorothy Highell. Winnie’s first wife,” said Joe. “Popsicle money. Dorothy used to say her grandfather Highell invented the Popsicle stick. Funds the institute along with some federal dollars.”

“Aha!” said Ilka.

“See that little building with the pillars? In 1886 that
was
Concordance College.”

“Aw!” said Ilka.

“Now,” said Jenny, “we’ll give you our Concordance town tour.”

“Do you like living in a small town?” asked Ilka, looking hard out of the window. “American streets always look too wide for the houses. I think American houses are always wanting to get away from the houses across the street and go West.”

“The bank,” said Jenny. The black glass block had been stood down on Main Street, a wandering piece of Madison Avenue. “Now!” said Jenny Bernstine. “Look up the hill to your right—look, look, look. Keep looking . . .”

Ilka saw bushes, bushes, bushes.

“There: Winnie’s house,” said Jenny.

Ilka thought she might have seen a yellow corner and a lot more bushes.

 

 

“Who will I talk to?” Ilka said to her friends in New York and started to cry. Her friends waited for her to finish. Leina, who sat beside Ilka, patted her arm.

Herbert said, “Winterneet lives in Concordance.”

Ilka said, “He did them a lecture series the year before his Nobel Prize.”

Jules said, “I knew this fellow—his brother-in-law used to play golf with the best friend of Winterneet’s lawyer. I’ll see if I still have his number.”

“This is your chance to discover the real America,” Ilka’s friends said to her. Ilka was a talker. Her friends were familiar with her refugee anecdotes; the friends of longest standing had seen her through her New York anecdotes, and she had seen them through theirs.

Ilka said, “I’ve got this theory that refugees don’t make discoveries. When discoverers finish discovering they retire home to Lisbon or London. It took me a decade to settle Manhattan and now I’m supposed to discover Concordance!” Ilka started crying again and said, “Bet you there are no refugee discoverers.”

“I have a theory,” Ilka said to Jacquelyn, “that there are no refugee discoverers, or did I tell you that already?”

“That’s all right,” said Jacquelyn. “Go on.”

Ilka practiced her theory on her friends, and on her circle of acquaintances, and on the circle that surrounded her acquaintances—the people one knew in New York. The thing acquired shape and developed a skin: “It took a decade to find the right drawer to keep my spoons in and turn on the bathroom light without groping and now I’m supposed to emigrate to Concordance! I don’t know anybody in Concordance!”

Everybody said, “Winterneet lives in Concordance,” and Ilka always said, “He did them a lecture series the year before his Nobel Prize.”

Ilka was astonished at the number of people she knew who knew people or knew people who knew people in Concordance, and they wrote down names and numbers for Ilka to call. A man whose name Ilka had forgotten so often she could never again ask him what it was gave her the number of the woman he had dated in Ann Arbor, who would love Ilka, whom Ilka would love. “Tell her I told you to give her a call.”

“Can you just give people calls?” asked Ilka.

“You’ll come and visit!” Ilka said to her mother. “I’ll come to New York for the holidays.”

It takes time to fit a key into other people’s doors, particularly when the phone inside is ringing, ringing, ringing. Alpha Stone wanted to welcome Ilka to Concordance. “We want to have you over as soon as the new semester settles in.”

Personnel had found Ilka the little house of an assistant professor on sabbatical. Ilka picked up a scattering of letters behind the door: E. D. Rasmussen; Prof. E. Rasmussen, Ph.D., and a handwritten envelope for Mrs. E. Rasmussen from one E. Lipton
in Madison, WI. The Rasmussens’ living room was upholstered in tweed, a worn and grubby orange. Ilka deduced little children. The stillness in the air suggested recent agitation, palpable absences like the absence of newly dead people. Ilka carried bags up the stairs, opened a door and stood smelling the alien temperature of other people’s bedrooms. She looked inside their closet. They were young people, strapped for money, collectors of checkered flannel bargain shirts in sharp, sad colors. Ilka felt their hurry, their wanting to fold themselves way back into the corners, with the children asking a lot of questions, children going berserk with intimations of a future in which they would not be anybody’s only business. The bed was covered with something too green. It had the wrong kind of sheen. Ilka chose not to touch it.