The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel (20 page)

This image of Donald was charming, so different than his often surly pose now. Eve poured the last of the champagne for them.

“What did you think of his work?”

“He certainly tried very hard.”

“But did you think he had talent?”

Klieg twisted his glass, watching the golden liquid swirl in the bottom. “I’m afraid not.”

This was the answer Eve had been expecting, even hoping for. It confirmed she had a right to be impatient with Donald, to be frustrated by his demands that she help with his work. And yet, she felt pained by the revelation, too. Donald had died too young; apparently without even having a legacy worth preserving.

“I take it you weren’t a fan of his ‘deconstructed style’?” she asked.

“No.”

“Too clever, too self-conscious?”

“Among other things.”

“Why do you think he didn’t put any emotion into his work?” Eve pressed, unable to help herself. “Isn’t that strange for an artist? I mean, look at your designs. Especially the early ones. They overflowed with exuberance and humor and optimism.”

Klieg folded his libretto in half and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket, which hung on a wall hook overhead. He stood.

Eve, puzzled, stood too. “I mean, isn’t art supposed to move
us as well as challenge us?” she asked. “I get the idea he had no emotions at all. Like he was just some kind of word machine without a heart.”

Klieg took a step toward the door, and when he spoke, he did not look at her. “You probably should not offer opinions on that which you do not fully understand,” he said softly.

   • • •

As soon as Eve got home, she took Highball and headed out in the direction of the river. She didn’t want to risk thinking about Klieg in Donald’s presence. Instinct told her to keep this development to herself, at least for now. For one thing, it was delicious to finally have a secret, to know something about Donald that he didn’t know she knew. It was still rare for her to come across anything even tangentially about him in any library books. Spending time with somebody who’d known Donald well could provide a wealth of information. But this would make Donald feel vulnerable, which would doubtless make him even more fractious than usual. And there were endless ways he could retaliate if he felt his power slipping.

It was early September now and the ginkgo leaves, shaped like little geisha fans, began to scatter themselves on the sidewalk. The air smelled earthen and damp, like the inside of a cave. She enjoyed these late-night ambles through the quiet streets. Without the traffic and tourists, this was when the Village felt most timeless.

The evening with Klieg, like their lunch in the spring, had ended strangely. But despite this, it represented something of a breakthrough. It was the first time she’d been with Klieg and not felt awed. Even though several people in the audience had spotted him and nudged one another, she had all but forgotten she was sitting next to someone famous.

The truth was, Klieg was a mortal, and a thorny one at that. There was something disquieting about the way he spoke of the
past. Unlike those of Eve’s grandfather, who used to spout happy tales of his barefoot boyhood like a geyser, Klieg’s accounts were halting and seemed to carry hidden, anguished layers of meaning. Yet it appeared that on some level he yearned to talk about the old days. It was as if he hadn’t spoken of them for so long, he had become afraid of losing them completely.

Eve wanted to hear more, more about Klieg and definitely more about Donald. And somehow she knew she would. Their relationship had changed tonight. She knew, even as Klieg had guided her down the stairs a little too quickly, that they would see one another again.

Back home, Eve was feeling expansive; she wanted to take a little dictation in this mood. Donald might have no real talent, no great legacy to defend, but was that the only criteria to consider? What about desire? Drive? Dedication? She pulled out the pad and a pen and settled into bed.

“Donald?” she called softly. “Donald?” But he did not answer.

   • • •

The next morning, it dawned on her how astonished, how proud, Penelope would have been to know that her daughter had just spent the evening on the town in New York with none other than Matthias Klieg.

Eve padded to the closet and pulled down the family album she kept on a high shelf. She sat cross-legged on the bed in her pale blue Chinese print pajamas and flipped through the heavy black pages, looking at the pictures affixed with little white corner-shaped stickers. There were many of her brothers, each with their father’s square jaw and chin dimple, and a family portrait taken at the Vernon Manor on her parents’ fifteenth anniversary, when Eve was seven. There were also a dozen or so pictures of her mother: with Gin and his partners and their wives at various benefits, a half-smile as she looked just over the camera lens; on a hammock in the backyard, reading a book and
wearing capris with apple red polish on her toes; at the beach in California under an enormous umbrella, the children in the foreground, building sandcastles in the sun. She was still so fresh-looking then; no one would have guessed that in just a couple of months, she would get desperately sick.

It started with weakness on one side of Penelope’s body. Her jet black hair took on an ashy cast, and in a matter of days, her luminous skin grew thin and veins sprouted across the backs of her hands. There was vomiting and double vision and loss of memory. She begged off from hosting parties for Gin’s partners and their wives, and her hothouse flowers began to droop. Soon after, her bed had been relocated to the den so she wouldn’t have to negotiate the stairs, and she lay on it, breathing shallowly, drinking water from a glass on her bedside table through an extra-long straw. A brain tumor, they said. There would be surgery, but first, medication to control the swelling. The doctors gave her special pills to take at specific intervals, without which it was said she would lapse into unconsciousness and soon after, well, they didn’t tell little girls things like that.

Gin’s pain took the form of distraction. He was unable to focus on cases, and his partners insisted he cut back his hours at the office. But aside from providing the pills like clockwork, he proved mostly useless. Words failed him, so instead he brought his wife tray after tray of objects, usually things she had no use for. There were beautiful plates of fruit she could not eat and stacks of books she hadn’t the strength to pick up. In desperation, he brought in jewelry from her box to wear and souvenirs from their trips abroad to hold in her slight, shaky hands. Not knowing how to talk to his children about what was happening, he encouraged them to spend as much time “in the fresh air” as possible, and the boys, who were on numerous teams, complied with resignation if not with enthusiasm.

But not Eve. Instead of heading to the library, where she usually listened to the “story lady,” she came home every day, right after school, taking up a post next to Penelope’s bed. At first,
they spoke of everyday things. Her fingers worrying the top of the sheet, her mother would ask about how the new gardener was faring with the dahlias or whether her father had remembered PTA night at the boys’ school.

One cool day, Eve reached for a hot water bottle next to the bed and knocked over one of the books that Gin had left in a stack on the floor. It was by someone named Dawn Powell and it was old and frayed but she liked the title,
The Happy Island
, which sounded like a place you’d want to go. She also liked the cover, a cabaret singer and piano player surrounded by patrons swilling drinks at checkered tables.

The dust jacket called the book’s characters “schemers and dreamers on crossed paths, embroiled in a series of dramas, double-crossings, and hullabaloos that would make the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah seem like mere suburbs of li’l old New York.” Eve laughed at the word “hullabaloo” and Penelope smiled. “Dawn Powell was from Ohio, just like us,” she said.

Eve opened the book and began to read aloud, enjoying wrapping her tongue around names like
Van Deusen
and
Dol Lloyd
, and places like
Hamburger Mary’s
and
The Studio Club
. The book read like a fairy tale, though a strange and brittle one. The characters were clever and arch but vulnerable because of their secrets. One of them, a nightclub singer named Prudence Bly, had left Silver City, Ohio—it seemed everyone was from Ohio—and all it represented, for New York. Eve loved the way her transformation was described: “Overnight she erased Silver City and overnight invented a new personality into which she stepped and, like her grandmother, kept this dress on day and night.”

“Before you were born,
I
was a New Yorker,” Penelope said, closing her eyes, her lashes fanning over the tiny strawberry-shaped birthmark under her left lower lid. “Did you know that, honey?”

Eve did know. Based on what she’d gathered from after-dinner-coffee conversations among the grown-ups, her mother—Penelope Easton, as she was known back then—had had
something of a colorful past “back East” before being claimed by her father, who’d made “an honest woman out of her.” Which was odd, because Eve had never heard even one story about her mother lying.

“What was it like there?”

Penelope opened her eyes to the ceiling, a canvas for a mental picture she seemed to paint. “I don’t think I can tell you, at least not in a way that would make any sense. New York is different for everyone. You need to see it for yourself.”

Eve kept reading, all afternoon and into the evening, when Gin brought in a deck of cards and shooed her out. But the next day she started again, and a few days after that, they finished the book and she picked up another. Over the weeks, Eve worked her way through the Powell collection, but with each volume, progress became slower because so many passages touched off recollections. In contrast to her short-term memory, Penelope’s long-term recall seemed to catch fire. In hoarse whispers, she mused about the charmers and the strivers, the rascals and criminals she had known, the kind of people “you find only in the Big Apple.”

Penelope’s tone grew wistful as she spoke of a young man named Mack. “Now, you can’t say anything to your father about this. But I did love someone else once. He was a writer and the leader of our gang. Talented, gregarious, audacious. The women were mad about him, but for some reason he only had eyes for me.” Penelope waxed on for several minutes about romantic strolls through the Village with Mack in the mid-sixties, perusing sidewalk art displays, listening to the folksingers around the fountain in Washington Square Park, and wandering the Italian section with its old men gossiping on the bocce courts and kids playing stickball. “Mack couldn’t walk past a game without waving for the broom handle,” she said, marveling at the memory. “He’d whack the ball and that thing would sail onto a roof two blocks away,”

“What happened to him?” asked Eve.

Penelope pressed her lips together and blinked hard one or
two times. “I came back here for the wedding of an old friend. I was one of her bridesmaids and your dad was one of the groomsmen. He pulled out my chair, took me on drives through the countryside and out to the Amish markets.” A bird flew out of a tree in the garden and Penelope turned her head toward the window. “I went back to New York, but not long after, a day came when I just knew it was time to come back home.”

“Because you’d fallen in love with Daddy?”

“Sure, sweetheart.”

Eve was happy to hear it. “And Mack?”

“We went our separate ways.”

“You told him you loved Daddy better?”

“I wrote him a note. It was easier.” Penelope closed her eyes and sighed.

“Is easier better?” asked Eve. But her mother was asleep.

Several weeks later, as Eve read aloud from
Turn, Magic Wheel
, Penelope began to perspire and her eyelids to flutter. In a whisper, she told Eve to get her father. Soon the room was full of men and equipment. Eve held her mother’s hand as she was wheeled through the living room. She had to stand aside when they got to the front door, and just before her mother slipped through, she gestured toward the book, still clutched in Eve’s hands. “You finish. You finish for both of us,” she said.

In the days and weeks that followed, Eve made her way through the shelves, reading the rest of her mother’s books, almost all, she would later realize, by New York writers. She read in her playhouse at the bottom of the garden or tucked up in her small room at the top of the stairs. She read while the funeral arrangements were made, while the lawyers and their wives milled around casseroles in the formal dining room, and while the corn rose in the fields and everyone else moved on.

Now Eve closed the album and placed it carefully on the floor beside the bed. She lay back and blinked up at the ceiling, head aswirl with pasts—hers, Klieg’s, and Donald’s.

T
hey ate at a minimalist Japanese place on the East Side, Bix and Eve sitting across a booth from Paul and Alex. It was a relief to be out with people her own age, people very much in the here and now. Much of the chatter broke down along gender lines but Bix proved to be a delightful companion. She wrote grant proposals for a nonprofit that distributed the hand-me-downs of wealthy New York children to the disadvantaged. She laughed easily and listened well.

“Alex really likes you, you know,” she said as they washed their hands in the ladies’ room.

“How do you know?” asked Eve.

“He’s handsome, thoughtful, passionate. Let’s just say girls come pretty easily to him. He’s got a different one every couple of weeks, without making much of an effort. And we, and by that I mean his college friends,
never
get to meet them. Yet he’s brought you to us twice. So yeah, I’d say he thinks you’re pretty special.”

After dinner, Eve had hoped they would go to one of the historic bars that she hadn’t yet seen, like Pete’s Tavern or the Algonquin. But everyone else wanted to go straight to the party, which turned out to be in a basement apartment in the Village.

Alex kissed her in the coat closet. “I missed you this week,” he said, and led her to the kitchen counter that served as the bar, where he mixed her a Manhattan. When the hosts dimmed the lights to show an arty video of the birthday boy, Alex nudged a friend off the couch so Eve could have a seat. The party was moving into high gear at 1 a.m. when he took her aside. “Want to get out of here?” he asked.