“Done,” she announced to Lonoff, “for now.”
His look of wistful solicitude made me wonder if she could be his gram/daughter. All at once he seemed the most approach able’ of men, relieved of every care and burden. Perhaps, I thought—still trying to explain some oddness in her that I couldn’t identify-—she is the child of a daughter of his own who is dead.
“This is Mr. Zuckerman, the short-story writer,” he said, teasing sweetly, like my grandfather now. “I gave you his collected works to read.”
I rose and shook her hand.
“This is Miss Bellette. She was once a student here. She has been staying with us for a few days, and has taken it upon herself to begin sorting through my manuscripts. There is a movement afoot to persuade me to deposit with Harvard University the pieces of paper on which I turn my sentences around. Amy works for the Harvard library. The Athene library has just extended her an exceptional offer, but she tells us she is tied to her life in Cambridge. Meanwhile, she has cunningly been using the visit to try to persuade me-?-”
“No, no, no,” she said emphatically. “If you see it that way. my cause is doomed.” As if she hadn’t charm enough, Miss Bellette’s speech was made melodious by a faint foreign accent. “The maestro,” she explained, turning my way, “is by temperament counter-suggestible.”
“And counter that,” he moaned, registering a mild protest against the psychological lingo. -”I’ve just found twenty-seven drafts of a single short story,” she told me.
“Which story?” I asked eagerly,
“Life Is Embarrassing.”
“To get it wrong,” said Lonoff, “so many times.”
‘They ought to construct a monument to your patience,” she told him. He gestured vaguely toward the crescent of plumpness but toned in beneath his jacket. They have.”
“In class,” she said, “he used to tell the writing students, “there is no life without patience.’ None of us knew what he was talking about.”
“You knew. You had to know. My dear young lady, I learned that from watching you.”
“But I can’t wait for anything,” she said.
“But you do.”
“Bursting with frustration all the while.”
“If you weren’t bursting,” her teacher informed her, “you wouldn’t need patience.”
At the hall closet she stepped out of the loafers she’d worn into the living room and slipped on white woolen socks and a
pan-of red snow boots. Then from a hanger she took down a plaid hooded jacket, into whose sleeve was tucked a white wool cap with a long tassel that ended in a fluffy white ball. Having seen her only seconds before banter so easily with the celebrated writer—having myself felt ever so slightly drawn into the inner circle by her easy, confident way with him—I was surprised by the childish hat. The costume, now that she had it on, seemed like a little girl’s. That she could act so wise and dress up so young mystified me.
Along with Lonoff I stood in the open doorway waving good bye. I was now in awe of two people in this house.
There was still more wind than snow, but in Lonoff ‘s orchard the light had all but seeped away, and the sound of what was on its way was menacing. Two dozen wild old apple trees stood as first barrier between the bleak unpaved road and the farmhouse. Next came a thick green growth of rhododendron, then a wide stone wall fallen in like a worn molar at the center, then some fifty feet of snow-crusted lawn, and finally, drawn up close to the house and protectively overhanging the shingles, three maples that looked from their size to be as old as New England. In back, the house gave way to unprotected fields, drifted over since the first December blizzards. From there the wooded hills began their impressive rise, undulating forest swells that just kept climbing into the next state. My guess was that it would take even the fiercest Hun the better part of a winter to cross the glacial waterfalls and wind-blasted woods of those mountain wilds before he was able to reach the open edge of Lonoff ‘s hayfields, rush the rear storm door of the house, crash through into the study, and, with spiked bludgeon wheeling high in the air above the little Olivetti, cry out in a roaring voice to the writer tapping out his twenty-seventh draft, “You must change your life!” And even he might lose heart and turn back to the bosom of his barbarian family should he approach those black Massachusetts hills on a night like this, with the cocktail hour at hand and yet another snowstorm arriving from Ultima Thule. No, for the moment, at least, Lonoff seemed really to have nothing to worry about from the outside world.
We watched from the front step until Lonoff was sure that she had cleared both the windshield and rear window; snow had already begun adhering to the icy glass. “Drive very slowly,” he called. To get into the diminutive green Renault she had to hike up a handful of long skirt. Above the snow boots I saw an inch of flesh, and quickly looked elsewhere so as not to be found out. “Yes, be careful,” I called to her, in the guise of Mr. Zuckerman the short-story writer. “It’s slippery, it’s deceptive.”
“She has a remarkable prose style,” Lonoff said to me when we were back inside the house. “The best student writing I’ve ever read. Wonderful clarity. Wonderful comedy. Tremendous intelligence. She wrote stories about the college which capture the place in a sentence. Everything she sees, she takes hold of. And a lovely pianist. She can play Chopin with great charm. She used to practice on our daughter’s piano when she first came to Athene. That was something I looked forward to at the end of the day.”
“She seems to be quite a girl,” I said thoughtfully. “Where is she from originally?”
“She came to us from England.”
“But the accent… ?”
“That,” he allowed, “is from the country of Fetching.”
“I agree,” I dared to say, and thought: Enough shyness then, enough boyish uncertainty and tongue-tied deference. This, after all, is the author of “Life Is Embarrassing”—if he doesn’t know the score, who does?
Standing by the fire, the two of us warming ourselves, I turned to Lonoff and said, “I don’t think I could keep my wits about me, teaching at a school with such beautiful and gifted and fetching girls.”
To which he replied flatly, “Then you shouldn’t do it”
A surprise—yes, yet another—awaited me when we sat down to dinner. Lonoff uncorked a bottle of Chianti that had been waiting for us on the table and proposed a toast. Signaling his wife to raise her glass along with his, he said, ‘To a wonderful new writer.”
Well, that loosened me up. Excitedly, I began talking about my month at Quahsay, how much I loved the serenity and beauty of the place, how I loved walking the trails there at the end of the day and reading in my room at night—rereading Lonoff of late, but that I kept to myself. From his toast it was obvious that I had not lost as much ground as I feared by confessing to the lure of clever, pretty college girls, and I did not want to risk offending him anew by seeming to fawn. The fawning, supersensitive Willis, I remembered, had been given less than sixty seconds on the phone.
I told the Lonoffs about the joy of awakening each morning knowing there were all those empty hours ahead to be filled only with work. Never as a student or a soldier or a door-to-door salesman did I have regular stretches of uninterrupted time to devote to writing, nor had I ever lived before in such quiet and seclusion, or with my few basic needs so unobtrusively satisfied as they were by the Quahsay housekeeping staff. It all seemed to me a marvelous, a miraculous gift. Just a few evenings before, after a day-long snowstorm, I had accompanied the Colony handyman when he set out after dinner on the snowplow to clear the trails that twisted for miles through the Quahsay woods. I described for the Lonoffs my exhilaration at watching the snow crest in the headlights of the truck and then fall away into the forest; the bite of the cold and the smack of the tire chains had seemed to me all I could ever want at the end of a long day at my Olivetti. I supposed I was being professionally innocent despite myself, but I couldn’t stop going on about my hours on the snowplow after the hours at my desk: it wasn’t just that I wanted to convince Lonoff of my pure and incorruptible spirit—my problem was that 1 wanted to believe it myself. My problem was that I wanted to be wholly worthy of his thrilling toast. “I could live like that forever,” I announced.
“Don’t try it,” he said. “If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you’ll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years.”
Lonoff made “Fantasy” sound like a breakfast cereal.
Here for the first time his wife spoke up—though given the self-effacing delivery, “spoke down” would be more exact. She was a smallish woman with gentle gray eyes and soft white hair and a multitude of fine lines crisscrossing her pale skin. Though she could well have been, as the amused literati had it, Lonoffs “high-born Yankee heiress”—and an excellent example of the species at its most maidenly—what she looked like now was some frontier survivor, the wife of a New England farmer who long ago rode out of these mountains to make a new start in the West. To me the lined face and the shadowy, timorous manner bore witness to a grinding history of agonized childbearing and escapes from the Indians, of famine and fevers and wagon-train austerities—I just couldn’t believe that she could look so worn down from living alongside E. I. Lonoff while he wrote short stories for thirty years. I was to learn later that aside from two terms at a Boston art school and a few-months in New York—and the year in London trying to get Lonoff to Westminster Abbey—-Hope had strayed no farther than had the locally prominent lawyers and clergymen who were her forebears, and-whose legacy by now came to nothing more tangible man one of the Berkshires’ “best” names and the house that went with it.
She had met Lonoff when he came at the age of seventeen to work for a chicken farmer in Lenox. He himself had been raised just outside Boston, though until he was five lived in Russia. After his father, a jeweler, nearly died from injuries suffered in the Zhitomir pogrom, Lonoff ‘s parents emigrated to primitive Palestine. There typhus carried them both away, and their son was cared for by family friends in a Jewish farming settlement. At seven he was shipped alone from Jaffa to wealthy relatives of his father’s in Brookline; at seventeen he chose vagabondage over college at the relatives’ expense; and then at twenty he chose Hope—the rootless Levantine Valentino taking as his mate a cultivated young provincial woman, bound to the finer things by breeding and temperament, and to a settled place by old granite gravestones, church-meetinghouse plaques, and a long mountain road bearing the name Whittlesey: somebody from somewhere, for all the good that was to do him.
Despite everything that gave Hope Lonoff the obedient air of an aging geisha when she dared to speak or to move, I still wondered if she was not going to remind him that his life had consisted of something more than reading and writing and looking at snow: it had also consisted of her and the children. But mere was not the hint of a reprimand m her unchallenging voice when she said, “You shouldn’t express such a low opinion of your achievement. It’s not becoming.” Even more delicately, she added, “And it’s not true.”
Lonoff lifted his chin. “I was not measuring my achievement. I have neither too high nor too low an estimate of my work. I believe I know exactly wherein my value and originality lie. I know where I can go and just how far, without making a mockery of the thing we all love. I was only suggesting—surmising is more like it—that an unruly personal life will probably better serve a writer like Nathan than walking in the woods and startling the deer. His work has turbulence—that should be nourished, and not in the woods. All I was trying to say is that he oughtn’t to stifle what is clearly his gift.”
Tm sorry,” replied his wife. “I didn’t understand. I thought you were expressing distaste for your own work.”
“Work” she pronounced in the accent of her region, without the “r.”
“I was expressing distaste,” said Lonoff, employing that pedantic tone he’d taken with Amy on the subject of her patience, and with me, describing his light-reading problem, “but not for the work. 1 was expressing distaste for the range of my imagination.”
With a self-effacing smile designed to atone on the spot for her audacity, Hope said, “Your imagination or your experience?”
“I long ago gave up illusions about myself and experience.”
She pretended to be brushing the crumbs from around the bread board, that and no more—while with unforeseen, somewhat inexplicable insistence, she softly confessed, “I never quite know what that means.”
“It means I know who I am. I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let’s leave it at that.”
She decided to. I remembered my food and began to eat again.
“Do you have a girl friend?” Lonoff asked me.
I explained the situation—to the extent that I was willing to.
Betsy had found out about me and a girl she had known since ballet school. The two of us had kissed over a glass of Gallo in the Kitchen, playfully she had shown me the tip of her wine-stained tongue, and I, quick to take heart, had pulled her out of her chair and down beside the sink. This took place one evening when Betsy was off dancing at the City Center and the friend had stopped by to pick up a record and investigate a flirtation we’d begun some months earlier, when Betsy was away touring with the company. On my knees, I struggled to unclothe her; not resisting all that strenuously, she, on her knees, told me what a bastard I was to be doing this to Betsy. I refrained from suggesting that she might be less than honorable herself; trading insults while in heat wasn’t my brand of aphrodisiac, and I was afraid of a fiasco if I should try it and get carried away. So, shouldering the burden of perfidy for two, I pinned her pelvis to the kitchen linoleum, while she continued, through moist smiling lips, to inform me of my character flaws. I was then at the stage of my erotic development when nothing excited me as much as having intercourse on the floor.
Betsy was a romantic, excitable, high-strung girl who could be left quivering by the backfire of a car—so when the friend intimated over the phone to her a few days later that I wasn’t to be trusted, it nearly destroyed her. It was a bad time for her, anyway. Yet another of her rivals had been cast as a cygnet in Swan Lake, and so, four years after having been enlisted by Balanchine as a seventeen-year-old of great promise, she had yet to rise out of the corps and if didn’t look to her now as though she ever would. And how she worked to be the best! Her art was everything, a point of view no less beguiling to me than the large painted gypsy-girl eyes and the small unpainted she-monkey face, and those elegant, charming tableaux she could achieve even when engaged hi something so aesthetically un promising as, half asleep in the middle of the night, taking a lonely pee in my bathroom. When we were first introduced in New York, I knew nothing about ballet and had never seen a real dancer on the stage, let alone off. An Army friend who’d grown up next door to Betsy in Riverdale had gotten us tickets for a Tchaikovsky extravaganza and then arranged for a girl who was dancing in it to have coffee with us around the corner from the City Center that afternoon. Fresh from rehearsal and enchantingly full of herself, Betsy amused us by recounting the horrors of her self-sacrificing vocation—a cross, as she described it, between the life of a boxer and the life of a nun. And the worrying! She had begun studying at the age of eight and had been worrying ever since about her height and her weight and her ears and her rivals and her injuries and her chances-right now she was in absolute terror about tonight. I myself couldn’t see that she had reason to be anxious about anything (least of all those ears), so entranced was I already by the dedication and the glamour. At the theater I unfortunately couldn’t remember—once the music had begun and the dozens of dancers rushed on stage—whether earlier she had told us that she was one of the girls in lavender with a pink flower in their hair or one of the girls in pink with a lavender flower in their hair, and so I spent most of the evening just trying to find her. Each time I thought that the legs and arms I was watching were Betsy’s, I became so elated I wanted to cheer—but then another pack of ten came streaking across the stage and I thought, No, there, that’s her.