Leslie said, “The State Department sends him on tours.”
“We knew Winterneet before he was Winterneet,” said Eliza. “Winnie was our ‘lodger’ and the day the baby disappeared he skedaddled. Got out of town.”
Ilka would have very much liked to hear more but was obliged to say, “That’s my house at the corner. I rent it from the Rasmussens. They’re on sabbatical.”
“Leslie, aren’t you going to be a gentleman and walk Ilka up the path to her front door?”
“Ilka, do you need to be walked to your front door?”
“Absolutely not,” said Ilka stoutly, and Leslie invited her to come Sunday morning.
Eliza said, “To a late breakfast.”
Ilka walked up her path in a state of happiness she had not experienced since New York: she liked the Shakespeares so much, and they had invited her to a late breakfast.
Leslie called Sunday morning. “I have chores in town. Eliza thought you might like me to pick you up on the way home.”
Ilka was pleased. She kept inventing more hardships from which being picked up by Leslie was going to save her well past
the point at which she perfectly understood his desire to get off the telephone.
“Is eleven a good time?”
Eleven was the perfect time by which Ilka would have finished grading her class papers. “This really is good of you . . .”
“Oh you bet,” said Leslie.
Ilka experienced the intense pleasantness of sitting beside Leslie Shakespeare, but it made her nervous. She obligated herself to entertain Leslie’s silence with speech, which, she hoped, was interesting without being tiresomely interesting. “Do you know that delicious moment when you have finished grading your last student and you have a whole week before you have to grade your next class?”
Leslie appeared to be thinking this over.
Ilka said, “It’s like the second before a holiday has had the first minute bitten out of it?”
Now Leslie had two things to think over.
Ilka said, “Like the moment in the theater when the curtain has just started going up?”
Leslie said, “I know that moment.”
Let him think up the next thing to say, but Leslie was turning in to his driveway. He walked Ilka into the kitchen to say hello to Eliza. “Can I help?” Ilka asked her.
“Christ, no!” said Eliza. “Leslie will make us Bloody Marys.”
Leslie and Ilka took their drinks into the living room. Ilka said, “I don’t know how you do it, but you and Eliza make me talk. You never ask me any questions, and I tell you everything I know.”
“That
is
odd,” said Leslie. When Ilka’s glass was empty he carried it out into the kitchen, and she heard him say, “Ilka says we never ask her questions and she tells us everything. She says, how do we do that?” Ilka imagined Eliza standing with her back to Leslie because she could not hear the answer. Ilka got up and
stood in the doorway and listened, and hearing Leslie’s returning footsteps, sat quickly down.
Leslie said, “Eliza says we ask questions in the form of suppositions.”
Ilka said, “The truth of the matter is that you and Eliza are accomplished listeners. I’m always interjecting my autobiography into the other person’s story. I mean to be expressing my sympathetic understanding, but all it does is take the conversation away from the other speaker. What you do is make little sounds like
mm
or
mf
, so that one feels you listening. Do you know what you do when somebody says something you don’t like?”
“What?” asked Leslie.
“You uncross your right leg from over your left knee and re-cross your left leg over your right knee.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Leslie.
“If I see you make some abrupt movement like suddenly picking up or putting down your glass, I know I’ve got some common fact dead wrong.”
Leslie said again that he would be damned, excused himself and walked out into the kitchen to tell Eliza what Ilka had said. He came back and said, “Eliza says we should bring our drinks and talk in the kitchen.”
Eliza once more refused Ilka’s offer of help. Ilka and Leslie sat at the table while Eliza sliced and chopped and grated. It was a large and pleasant kitchen. Two snapshots, one of a little baby with a large bib, and one of an apple tree in full fruit, were stuck into the frame of the window.
Ilka said, “The Rasmussens’ kitchen is full of doodads. When I moved in, I hid things away in back of the cupboard and went shopping. I bought this beautiful Danish chopping board made of blocks of different kinds of wood.”
“Did you? I fished this one,” Eliza pointed to a little square of wood with a cracked corner, “out of Lake Michigan in 1959.”
Leslie said, “Tell Eliza what you said about the way I listen.”
Ilka repeated to Eliza what she had said, and Eliza asked, “How do I listen?”
“You look pleased when you hear some half-truth or nonsense; you get a satisfied look, as if the world were bearing out the opinion you privately held of it.” Ilka was excited to feel them listening to what she was saying; she hoped she would be able to stop talking. She said, “In the weeks I’ve known you I’ve told you all my stories, but I know very little about you,” and she asked what Eliza meant about asking questions in the form of suppositions.
Eliza said, “If you ask me point-blank how I lost my baby”—here Leslie got out of his chair and walked to the sink and stood beside Eliza, “—I’d say what my rotten little American cousins used to say to me—like ‘Mind your own beeswax,’ or, ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’ But suppose you said, ‘It must have been a warm day when you left the baby in her stroller in front of the door?’ I might say, ‘Actually, it was one of those lovely-looking April days’”—Eliza walked to the refrigerator and Leslie kept beside her—“ ‘that
looked
warm, or maybe I was longing for the Chicago winter to be over. When we got outside it was chilly.’” Leslie walked to the stove with Eliza. “I put the brakes on the stroller, ran in, got her blanket that I had already washed and put away, and out fell a box of mothballs, so I ran and got the broom and dustpan and I’ll drive Leslie crazy telling you the whole story.”
“Just what my mother does,” said Ilka. “She tells the whole story of how she left my father sitting on the side of the road before Obernpest a week before the end of the war, and she never saw him again.”
Drivers in American movies made poor Ilka nervous, the way they took their eyes off the road to make love to the person in the seat beside them. Leslie kept his blue eye fully forward, leaving
Ilka at liberty to study his fine head, the stern upper lip, the cheek with its high, healthy male fairness. “I did it again!” she said. “I told my father-story and stopped Eliza talking about the baby!”
“She will tell it to you again,” Leslie said.
“How long ago was this?”
“It will be fifteen years next April 15.”
“Doesn’t the pain pale?”
Leslie thought about this and said, “It seemed intolerable when it happened, and it seems intolerable today.”
Ilka resented the Shakespeares’ intolerable loss. She imagined it like a wound in their lives, a flaw in their pleasures that flawed the pleasure she wanted to be at liberty to feel when she was with them. Ilka wished the baby unlost.
Before he left her off at her gate, Leslie invited Ilka to breakfast the following Sunday. Again he called and offered to pick her up. Again Ilka worried about not helping, but what Eliza wanted was for Ilka and Leslie to sit and drink their Bloody Marys in the kitchen and talk where she could hear them. She said, “Winnie’s back. He wanted to come for breakfast, but I said we had other plans.”
“I’ll phone him later,” said Leslie.
“I told him to come get his boxes.”
“What’s Winterneet like?” asked Ilka.
“A Peanuts cartoon,” replied Eliza. “A swelled head walking on his little shoes.”
“You don’t like him?” Ilka asked doubtfully.
Leslie said, “Winterneet and the Bernstines are our oldest American friends.”
“How did you meet him?” asked Ilka.
Leslie said, “When we were graduate students in Chicago, Winnie was an adjunct professor. Everybody was short of money.
Winnie’s marriage with Dorothy was breaking up and he moved in with us—”
“—and having spread his papers over every surface of every room in the apartment,” Eliza said, “he moved out . . .”
Leslie uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
“. . . and moved in with Susanna,” Eliza said. “Leslie collected the papers into a cardboard box that I fell over in our foyer all summer and autumn. Come the first snow I put it out in the driveway.”
“You didn’t!” said Ilka.
“Yes, I did,” said Eliza.
Ilka looked at Leslie, who said, “She did.”
“Leslie brought it in and carried it to his study. When Winnie left Susanna he moved back with his second box of papers.”
“You know what I love?” Ilka said when Leslie presently stood up, handling his car keys inside his jacket pocket. “I like it that you let a person know when you’ve had enough of them.”
“Always the gentleman,” said Eliza.
“No, but it means I can sit and enjoy myself without worrying whether the time has come for me to offer to go home. Eliza and Leslie, I make you a proposition: Will you be my elective cousins? I’m low on the kind one has by blood.”
Leslie and Eliza agreed to be Ilka’s elective cousins, and Eliza invited her to come over after dinner, Saturday. The Bernstines were dropping by for drinks. Leslie said he would pick her up.
Saturday, and Ilka walked into the Shakespeares’ living room. On a chair, with a drink in his hand, sat a man whose graying orange hair was the color, exactly, of the expanse of his cranium. He had a flat face with shallow features—the nose was blunt and short, the eye-sockets lacked shadow. His shoes were child-sized. It was the actual Winterneet regarding Ilka with a smile that revealed a small, charming gap between the two upper front teeth. Ilka lowered
her eyes, raised them, and the actual Winterneet was still smiling at her. Here came the Bernstines. Leslie brought drinks and Eliza a platter of what Winterneet, with his delightful smile, called the “eats.”
Ilka meant to keep looking intelligently engaged in a conversation these old friends must have been having together for the past decades. Once in a while Leslie threw Ilka a scrap of data, a gloss on a name: “It was Frank who introduced Susanna and Winterneet in sixty-three, wasn’t it? Susanna was Dave Foster’s half sister,” Leslie explained.
“Aha!” Ilka kept saying.
The phone rang. Leslie walked out into the hall.
“Sixty-four is when we had the baby . . .” said Eliza—Ilka observed Joe Bernstine plant his hands on the arms of his chair, ready to rise, saw Jenny’s forehead corrugate—“and you removed yourself to Berkeley. In sixty-five,” Eliza said to Winterneet, “your three boxes moved to Amherst with us.” Joe settled back; Jenny’s face continued anxious.
Winterneet said, “When I get back from London, I’ll come over and spend the day, and sort out what I want to throw away.”
Leslie returned, “It’s Una. She’s at Kennedy.”
Eliza said, “Tell her no.”
Leslie said, “She just got in from London.”
Eliza said, “No.”
Leslie went out.
Winnie asked, “And how is our little Una?”
“I was happy, until a minute ago, to have heard nothing about little Una for the last six months,” said Eliza.
“She wrote me,” said Leslie returning into the room.
“Well, I was happy to hear nothing about it,” said Eliza.
“Well, I thought you would be happy,” said Leslie.
“Little Una in the granny dress with straw in her hair!” said Winterneet.
“That,” said Eliza, “is our Una.”
The Bernstines offered to give Ilka a lift home. Winterneet said he’d stay if someone would offer him a nightcap.
In the car Ilka asked the Bernstines about Una.
“Poor Una! Fell rather in love with Leslie and Eliza. Leslie-and-Eliza.”
“I can understand that,” said Ilka.
“The Shakespeares brought her back to the States with them. Her father is the theologian, Paul Thayer.”
“Uncle” said Joe, and they argued about Una’s relationship to this Paul Thayer until they arrived at Ilka’s gate.
Sunday morning Leslie called and fetched Ilka in the car. Ilka walked into Eliza’s kitchen and there was Winterneet sitting at the table smiling at Ilka.
Ilka was not some young thing; it annoyed her not to be able to keep up her end—like Eliza, who could cut and slice, correct the seasoning, and perform last-minute maneuvers at the stove and keep the conversation flying like some high-wire act. Ilka developed a crick in the neck looking from a joke of Eliza’s to Winterneet, who swung with it into a mutual reminiscence. Eliza, tossing and tasting the salad, elaborated a very tall tale that Winterneet topped with a deliciously nasty quip. Ilka wanted to play with them, up there, in the middle air, but the palpitation of her heart preempted her breathing. Ilka hunkered down waiting for the laughter to run its course before she took the running start to get her own joke airborne with enough breath for the punch line, but Eliza, removing her beautiful French bread from the oven, had started a story that grew naturally out of Winterneet’s point, which Ilka missed, because it took off from what she suspected herself of not having recognized as a quotation. Ilka crouched to wait for the next opening in the hope of having thought of something that would fit whatever might by that time be under discussion.
Leslie, leaning back in his chair, observed his wife and his friend with the air of a man eating the best bread and butter, and listening to the best conversation, in his own house, at his own breakfast. Eliza had glided two coddled eggs onto Leslie’s plate when the doorbell rang. Leslie looked regretful, got reluctantly up, and went to answer the door. He came back. He said, “Dear. It’s Una.”