The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (12 page)

Adele shivered when she remembered that her great hope for the summer had been that she might meet Bernard Berenson. It was grimly distressing for her when Matt said, “You look as good in your bathing suit as all the belles at Cannes, and those gals don’t begin to know as much about the Old Masters as you.” Her heart ached at the mention of the Old Masters, and a look of desolation came over her face. But the pain passed and she found that she took a perverse delight in appearing — indeed, in
being
— precisely the sort of girl who naturally would be Matt’s mistress. It was pleasant, somehow, to feel that this role was right for her, rather than monstrously accidental, or faintly comic. She wore a slim orange linen dress that displayed her sunburned shoulders, and she imagined there was the same imbecilic pout on her heavily creamed lips as on the lips of her vacationing “colleagues.” Sometimes she and Matt sat for an hour without speaking. On one of these occasions, he finally said, “Cat got your tongue, sweet? If you don’t come out with something soon, people will think we are married.”

Adele allowed Matt to make all the decisions. They swam and sunned and ate and gambled; they walked and looked and sat and sipped. She did not mind being a typical money-flush American tourist, and Matt’s dollars had for her the sheer power and fascination they had for hotel owners, porters, and headwaiters. And what a relief that the dollars were simply themselves — items of pure utility. This glorious money was not to be spent with the hope of exclusiveness; instead, the dollars were to be poured into the expected vessels — the well-known tills of the democratic, fully advertised “best” hotels and restaurants. The generosity with which Matt expressed himself aroused in Adele a combination of shame and slavishness, a strange union of emotions that were dramatic and thrilling in themselves, like the emotions a fastidious, intelligent woman might secretly feel for a powerfully attractive policeman, or a soldier met by chance, or the young man on the grocery truck. And, too, Matt was obstinately gentle and protective. She was extraordinarily happy.

“Did you really drink too much? I like to think you are just boasting, pretending to excess. It seems impossible that you were a tremendous drinker,” Adele once said to him.

“I was. Indeed I was. I have known tortures and been a torturer. I have been at the very bottom,” Matt said, blushing for the dangers he had passed, almost as if he felt too modest to claim them in all their extremity.

“And did your second wife drink, too?”

“Yes, she did — and does. Like fish, I believe it is expressed.”

“How strange! I cannot imagine it at all. You don’t seem the type. You seem made for happiness, I must say, but perhaps that is superficial.”

“Happiness superficial?”

“No, my thinking you are made for it.” And then Adele noticed that Matt’s plump little hands were trembling, as if she had made some spectacular declaration of love for him.

“Poor Matt,” she said suddenly, moved by the thought of his complacence and his humbleness purchased with suffering. Matt was complacent about his victorious struggle over weakness, humble from memory of that weakness.

He had only five weeks in Europe and then had to fly home to his office. Adele, with a falling sensation, went back to Paris — to her cheap restaurants and her student friends, to dull engagements with people on her “list,” to serious young Americans planning great things for themselves. She had a miserable winter, spent mostly in Brussels, with lonely trips to Ghent, Bruges, and the museums in Holland. She worked hard, because this discipline was now a part of her nature, but she was cold and dreary, and found both herself and her life disappointing. With a nearly unbearable stab of anguish, she realized she had nothing new to say about van Eyck or about Flemish altar painting. No effort could temper that discouraging realization. Again she felt close to tears a great deal of the time, and she tried to run away from her distress by spending three weeks in London. Here she saw people her own age — school friends, scholars with no money — and began to have some hope that she could manage for herself. She looked up more names on her list, and each captured person was nice, but the coldness and dreariness and loneliness of the winter were stronger than anything else and they prevailed. Wherever she went, her slim beauty astonished people, but this was mere admiration and counted for little when what she wanted was freedom, excitement, companionship, decisions taken off her shoulders. It was humiliating; nevertheless she looked forward to her return to New York and to a job.

During the winter, Matt wrote to her. More than once, he sent her mad cables from bars, where he, cold sober, went with his clients and managed to do all the wild, exaggerated things he used to do when drunk. He sent her nylon stockings; he wrote her love letters, which were unaccountably shy and inexpressive, beginning with a “Dear” and ending abruptly with “Love, Matt.” The propriety and epistolary decorum of Matt’s Illinois Methodist forebears came out when he was obliged to send a love letter across the ocean. Adele, on the other hand, wrote him some rather emotional letters, filled with all the aches of her loneliness. In Matt’s presence her language had not been marked by ardor, but now that he was away — far away — caution, shyness, and even her good sense vanished, and she wrote whatever came into her head.

In her letters to her mother, Adele had mentioned Matt, but always with a show of cynicism. That seemed to be the proper way to speak to her mother about such a person as Matt. It was easier for Adele to be ashamed of her disloyalty than to display, for her mother’s eye, mushiness and sentimentality. She wrote, “Here in Belgium I feel as spleenish as Baudelaire did about this country and its people. I could even wish, in my fallen state, for the company of my huckster dude friend Matt.”

When Adele’s year abroad was over, she returned to New York looking pale and sadly shabby. She returned with boxes and boxes of books, and with the sorrow of her desolate winter still clinging to her. Her mother and Matt were waiting at the dock. She was swept up immediately into Matt’s gushing generosity, lifted from the crowded third-class lounge into the dizziness of an irregular, free-spending city life. Matt, looking plump, rosy-faced, and brightly evident, had been about his work for an hour before the boat was due to arrive: porters had been bribed; a taxi driver had been tipped and told to come back at the precise moment when, according to Matt’s calculations, a cab would be needed; a small bouquet of white roses had miraculously stayed damp and fresh while Matt managed and bribed and tipped and waited. The free and somewhat comic expenditure of cash was, with him, a special kind of attractiveness. In his presence there were always eagerness and rush and the jingling of coin; everything was funny — people laughed, Matt laughed. Prodigal and cozy, benevolently smiling, familiar and yet magical in his powers, he was like some comfortable, homely, prayer-answering god of the hearth and table. He was, it soon came out, making more money than ever.

Lily Wayland, whom Matt was meeting for the first time, made a great impression on him. Her throaty voice and distinguished smile had gracefully survived a hard winter. She had not known that Matt would be there to meet Adele, but she smiled and enjoyed his gallantries and efforts quite as gratefully as her daughter did. With her nose buried in Adele’s rose bouquet, she could not resist saying, “Our thanks, Baron Ochs, our cavalier!,” trusting, with reason, that Matt would not recognize the reference to the fat, lusty villain in the Strauss opera.

Matt bowed happily and whizzed the ladies off to their apartment, where he insisted he would leave them for the afternoon, because they must have “everything and its grandmother to talk over together.” They were, however, quick to accept his invitation for dinner.

“It seems a little second-rate to be rushing out the first night you’re home, darling,” Lily said to Adele after he had left. “And the man — to me, at least — is nearly a stranger. Still, I couldn’t even try to resist. Gracious, how splendid not to have to cook your triumphal meal!”

“Yes, Mother,” Adele said. “I’m ashamed to admit how much I hope he takes us to some smart place.”

“Yes, something costly and filled with important people to look upon and gossip about.”

During the afternoon, Adele lazily went about unpacking, all the while astonishingly aware of the way she was longing for the time when Matt, with his eternally waiting taxi, would rush up to the apartment, lift her out of her independence, and lead her gaily from one place to another. It was delightful to think of being handed about, paid for, displayed once more. Had Matt been a really wealthy man, some guilt and complication might have attached to all this, but no matter how high his earnings might go, no one could really think of Matt as anything except childishly free-spending and high-tipping. No great moral issues presented themselves; he was the lower orders on a perpetual spree, rather than an instance of privilege. Matt was the man who “had plenty of dough”; he was not to be described as “rich” or “wealthy.”

In September, Adele began a job with the Metropolitan Museum. It was not the important appointment she had dreamed of in her college days; it did not pay very well, and yet she could at least feel — or try to — that her connection with the great museum justified her years of labor and study. Things would have been happier had she been able to think of her new work as the end she sought, but this was not the case. All during the working day, she experienced anxiety about her career and shame about the extraordinary and undeniable decline of her professional ambition. Nervously she would vow to set aside three evenings a week and all day Sunday for her writing on Flemish altar painting — but just to think of Flemish altar painting filled her with distress. She scolded herself because the pieces were not
already
written; she sighed with regret for the extra work she had failed to do during her precious year abroad. She could not endure the thought that her lovely life was to be just this — just working in the museum five days a week. The work was pleasant, but she had not asked for a pleasant job; she had asked herself for some sort of unique achievement and situation. She even began to take stock of her beauty, to admit it, to criticize herself for wasting that talent, along with her others. She was indeed beautiful, and if this was to be all — the present agreeable job — she might better not have gone to college in the first place. If, somehow, destiny meant to deprive her of personal greatness, she was certainly fit to marry greatness, fit to live on the public stage, to adorn a serious and exalted life. This vision and these demands were not merely her own; they were her heritage from her mother and father. True, her father, Dickie Wayland, had not “done anything,” but he had been well known as a charmer, sought out as a famous, even an “important,” ne’er-do-well.

Adele, however, did not write her articles three nights a week and on Sunday. Instead, she went home from work, took a bath, creamed her face, lay down on the bed with her eyes closed, in preparation not for art history but for an evening engagement. With terrible impatience and gratitude she waited for Matt to call for her at seven-thirty. Always they went out. They dined; they went to the theater, to movies, and to amusing bars for a nightcap. Rarely, she went back with Matt to the grubby apartment he lived in, near First Avenue. More often, she went home, slept soundly, and awakened with her mind already set upon the coming evening, only hoping to endure the coming day. Lily Wayland sometimes went out to dinner or to the theater with them. When she protested that she should not accept Matt’s generosity, he would fall on his knees and say in a fake Southern accent, “Miss Lily, we all adores you!” He did adore Lily; he sent her funny postcards signed with ridiculous names, he brought flowers, gloves, a scarf. Lily accepted his gifts with her hoarse, indolent laugh, and said, “I’m a rotten peach already, so spoil me more!”

Alone with Adele, Lily once reflected, “That man is frightfully good-hearted. I feel a little uncertain about it, a little guilty. Are we taking advantage of him, do you suppose?”

“I hope not!” Adele said, hastening to leave the subject. She did not, as the months passed, like to discuss Matt with her mother. The temptation to be frank and ironical about him had vanished; she did not want to talk about him in any manner now.

And it always seemed that just when they wanted Matt, there he was, at the door, doffing his cheap hat, looking absurd, bowing and calling out, “Dear ladies! I do not know which I love best, the dear widow or my beautiful work of art.”

Adele did not ask herself openly where her romance with Matt would end. She even tried to prevent herself from wondering about it, and fortunately she had little time to wonder, because she was either working or dressing for the evening or falling asleep exhausted and strangely happy. During these months, she continued to have other engagements from time to time. She went to exhibitions on Saturday afternoons with her old friends. Occasionally, she went along with them to bottle parties in the Village at some painter’s studio, or to cold-water-flat cocktail parties where thirty people got very drunk in one tiny room. At these times, she was always quiet and friendly, but withdrawn, and experiencing faint feelings of depression and self-criticism. These parties and friends brought back the terrors and hopes of her school years; a fever of competitiveness would rise in her briefly, along with a terrible reluctance to begin her labors once more. Sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a painter’s studio, she would be forced to accept herself as one who worked madly only to fall apart on the very threshold of her goal — one who sank just as land was in sight. As she looked about the disordered studio, her art history was threatening to her inward peace, and yet fearful still in its hold upon her. But when she was with Matt, her art history did not challenge her; instead, it took its rightful place as an accomplishment to be proud of, a lucky circumstance, a gift from heaven. It was like her beautiful legs and her clever mother. Matt imagined that her learning, of itself, brought Adele the satisfaction she had sought when she so industriously, and at such cost to herself, acquired it.