The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (15 page)

The maid was at sea about the new husband. Although Henry took a flattering interest in her affairs, asked her many questions about her life, and was always sympathetic and undemanding, she longed for her old relationship with Clara, which was less personal and more orderly. The maid, like Clara, admired Henry, but both women felt, secretly, that he hadn’t a right to his easy curiosity. They did not know how to take the fact that he lacked ambition and yet cherished his few accomplishments extremely. It turned out that Henry was always reading over his Balzac translation, sometimes picking it up again after midnight when he couldn’t sleep. He also cherished, like the memory of an old flame, the fact that he had once been a Communist, even though he was now an implacable foe of that persuasion. Clara, rigidly middle-class, was uncomfortable whenever Henry spoke of politics; she felt that his accomplishments didn’t measure up to the vehemence of his opinions and that seriousness and ideas were something one earned. They were not pleasures honestly acquired by lying on the sofa, reading. But she was afraid to touch upon the real and immense issue: Henry’s indolence. She felt that if she allowed herself to think of this, it would become more powerful, more engulfing than ever. Modestly, cautiously, she would sometimes dart about it, saying, “Darling Henry, if I could write as well as you and knew as much about as many things, I’d be at my desk all the time.” Henry would answer this with a chuckle of amused sympathy, but whether he was sympathizing with himself or with her was rather hard to decide. Clara brought home news of her work. The magazine had got more serious, she told him. Every month there were letters complaining about the frank articles on sex, mental hospitals, drug addiction, public scandals. “We take a very liberal and courageous line for a mass-circulation magazine,” she explained.

Henry read Clara’s magazine and said he found the love stories and the lush advertisements more interesting than the exposés. Clara was hurt by this pronouncement but said nothing. She gave a lot of silent thought to it, and at last said to herself, in a private decision, that she “sort of understood” what Henry meant. Gradually, she was moving along with Henry into a world of strange distinctions, sudden ironies, and unexpected preferences; she found humor where she had found none before, and sighed with ennui where she had previously been fascinated. All her senses seemed alerted, and she felt in herself that exhilarating but dangerous clarity climbers experience at the top of a mountain. When she arrived at her office in the morning, it was as though she had come there from a far-off place — come from some brilliant, windy zone to a new and difficult climate. Her red leather chair, her signed photograph of Mrs. Roosevelt, her efficient long desk of special design — these items seemed to her amusing, mere props for a film about a career woman in a great Manhattan firm. She laughed gaily at the people in the office, but always with graciousness and a note of patience and forgiveness. It was pleasant to be seeing things for the first time — to feel the frightening clarity.

One morning, a hurried conference was called. In Mrs. Morton’s eyes there was a nervous eagerness and satisfaction, and Clara suddenly found herself saying with a bright, abrupt laugh, “I feel the fury of a forthcoming crusade.”

Mrs. Morton’s little face twitched, as if she might cry. She did not look again at Clara but after some expectant and breathless chatter asked her assembled staff what they thought of — and here she took a deep breath — a piece on homosexuality! The staff breathed heavily. There were perhaps fewer quick suggestions than usual, but excitement and interest were great. Mrs. Morton had in mind a well-known doctor with a light, clear style, just the man to tell the staff and the readers what to think. “Something absolutely honest and forthright,” she explained, “but done in good taste — perfect taste.”

“I think our readers will on the whole stand by us, but there will certainly be complaints, perhaps quite a few of them,” said the business manager. “We must be prepared for that.” This man was thin-cheeked and nervous; he drank a good deal and had had to suffer manfully through several months of copy about alcoholism. The new direction relieved him considerably.

“I don’t find this topic at all
suitable
,” the office conservative said sourly. This lady, an associate editor, was kept on the staff as a stubborn presence that stimulated revolt, the way an anarchist publication might bear the name and face of its capitalist founder.

Clara’s mind was preoccupied with the desire to tell Henry all about this conference. When it came her turn to speak, she smiled and said, “I don’t know why we should feel courageous for telling people what everyone already knows.”

Courtesy, equality, and consideration prevailed, and no one answered Clara’s remark. The silence was a bit disarming, but she nevertheless felt quite elated at having had her say, and in the evening she remarked to Henry, “Honestly, the childish way they carry on at the office! When they make the most harmless decision, they are likely to take it so seriously you would think they were setting out on some revolutionary policy.”

“We are all helpless when we try to understand that kind of simple faith,” Henry said cryptically.

For the past few weeks, Henry’s days had been filled with a new project of his own. He had started reading the volumes containing the transcript of the Nuremberg Trials in the public library, and he was making an excited and thorough study of the whole affair. Clara was impressed by this undertaking and told her colleagues about it. “No, he’s not a lawyer,” she explained, “but he’s fascinated by all this and will no doubt be one of the few people in the whole world to have read the entire, complete transcript.”

Henry’s new occupation was a manly and promising one. In a tired moment in the afternoon, Clara would sometimes allow her thoughts to wander off in a dream, a pantomime in which Henry quite suddenly rose to national prominence as a writer for the press, somewhat in the style of Walter Lippmann. Still, on the whole she did not often have dreams for Henry. She asked only for him to get through the day without despairing, and for a burst of good conversation and an hour with their record collection in the evening; these last were an indescribable joy, the solace that her spirit sought and for which she was thankful.

One day at her office, Clara said to Mrs. Morton, “We’re all boring do-gooders, fakes, a little. Perhaps it would be more fun — more practical, even — if we just admitted that the magazine is not a world-shaking concern, not a great monument to the public good.”

Again Mrs. Morton greeted Clara’s apostasy with the threat of tears. She touched the younger woman’s arm in a confused, motherly fashion. “Poor Clara! Is anything wrong? Can we help you?”

Clara did not respond to the mother hen. Insolently, she found it oddly gratifying to stare Mrs. Morton out of countenance, to wait, with a superior shrug, for the answer that could not be given.

Perhaps there was a measure of cruelty in the suddenness of Clara’s dismissal from her position, and there was certainly real and prolonged embarrassment. Mrs. Morton looked quite desolated by the decision. “You’ll be much happier somewhere else,” she said to Clara with marked sincerity. “Isn’t it what you’ve been wanting, dear?”

“It certainly is not!” Clara answered, completely taken by surprise. “I never thought of leaving — never! I admit that quite honestly.”

“You
are
honest, Clara,” Mrs. Morton said in a reflective voice. “I have never known anyone more so. But I think you don’t quite realize, my dear, how much you
do
want to leave. I have no doubt it is an unconscious wish, but present in your heart nevertheless. Things often happen in that way. I don’t want you to be miserable. You’re so bright, so realistic, so reliable! What haven’t you done for us here! I must say I envy those who will benefit from your talents.”

Clara was dazed, as if some peculiar accident had happened to her — something that stripped her of all her dignity, leaving her to appear foolish rather than tragic. “This is the end of everything I’ve built up,” she said with forthright desperation. “I’ll probably sink now, and be resentful and difficult.”

Mrs. Morton was pained by Clara’s statement. Apparently she had expected something different, a dignified and resourceful Clara, bowing out with polite indifference. “It’s quite impossible for you to sink, Clara,” she said, her eyes rapidly blinking. “Your work is too valuable, you are too clever.”

Henry was quite as surprised as Clara had been. His curiosity was enormous. He wanted to spy on the great world of activity when it was grinding out a major shock. In morbid pursuit of detail, he wanted to know what each person had said, how Mrs. Morton had looked. His speculations were rather farfetched, Clara thought, but his summing up was chillingly simple. “How perfectly extraordinary,” he said, “when no one could have suited the place better.”

Clara stayed at home, living from day to day in the same bruised astonishment she had felt after Arthur left her. Henry proceeded with the Nuremberg Trials, although he was not inspired to anything except oral comment upon this subject to which he had given so many weeks. And at last even these volumes and their relentless reader were exhausted. Again Henry’s gentle, charmed depression filled the air of their apartment like a fragrant poisonous gas.

“I’m sorry,” he would say, and Clara would be surprised to learn he was not speaking of
her
disappointment and failure.

“Sorry, dear? What do you mean?” she would ask him, in the edgy manner of someone expecting a disagreeable answer.

“Sorry that I’m so dull and feeling so low. I’m afraid you’ve now got the hideous chance to see my parched and dry mind in a closeup view.” He had fallen into an apologetic, despairing mood. “It’s not pleasant for me, of course, but it must be even worse for you, since you are usually so energetic and bright,” he added ruefully.

“What is even worse for me?”

“Having such a dreary person underfoot all day.”

Clara made a great effort to give up her study of Henry, but she could not achieve this desired incuriosity. The confounding facts of his temperament, with his absolute self fixed and bound to its weaknesses in a way that was somehow majestic, were not to be fully grasped. Some peculiar metabolism, some undulating course of mood dominated his personal history. Very little could happen to Henry, but what little could arrived and departed with awful regularity. One should not, Clara decided, say that Henry was selfish. He was one of those who, for mysterious and mighty reasons, could not work, and yet he did not need comfort and would have lived on roots and berries if it had been necessary. He did not envy anyone. He asked only for a relief of his inner state; his humble desire was that Providence would see fit to return him to a lost condition of well-being. In the end, Clara felt she could not truly define him as lazy — not even that. He arose with a prayer in his heart, so to speak, but his demon arose with him. The absolute quality of his nature, the way his efforts did not bear fruit, the way he could sweetly accept his lot without demanding help from others — all this made him haunting and dear to her.

Nevertheless, Clara herself had suffered and was still suffering from the shock of losing her job. She, too, needed to recover something lost — needed to make sure that her energy, wonder, and purpose still existed. She wanted peace and power over her life, and so she did not wish to settle into a new job until her moral strength had returned. Also, she was proud, and felt like a recalled diplomat or a deposed secretary of state; she was not one to run off to an employment bureau. Clara went through the days in a drugged, dreamlike state, which was at times even sluggishly pleasant. She found that when she forced an afternoon walk on both of them, they were likely to return more worn and silent than before. The maid was let go, and Clara made the dreary discovery that although she was a food expert, she was not a very good cook. Even the tropical, bright, fresh beauty of her apartment seemed to darken and wither; the atmosphere of spruceness, cleanness, coolness slowly gave way to gloom, self-criticism, and indolence.

Clara had anticipated that Henry would be annoyed by having her about all day. She had — in her spirit, at least — acknowledged the problem of their being together from morning to night, day in and day out. But she was not prepared for the slight reversal of expected feeling by which Henry’s nature expressed itself. For his own part, he said, he liked nothing better than having Clara about all day, but he could not accept that she should be subjected to
his
invariable presence. “It’s unfair,” he told her. “You’ll become bored without perhaps being aware of it at first. Boredom is an immense thing, one of the deadly sins. Don’t experiment with it.”

“Nonsense, honey,” Clara said lightly, but already, after the very first days at home, she had an unwelcome understanding of the great anguish that was rising up in Henry. His face quickly took on a strained look; his kindness and admiration moved her to tears. “What a fine woman you are,” he said more than once. “I was wrong to let you marry me.”

Henry could not bear Clara’s constant scrutiny. It was not that he found it a nuisance or an inconvenience or a bore; the utter, literal, destroying truth was that he could not bear it. Only now that Clara was without a job did she realize how busy she had been and how little their marriage had altered Henry’s life. He had his rhythm, which kept him from putting a bullet in his head. In solitude, reading the three or four newspapers he took every morning, setting out in the afternoon for a bus ride to Washington Square, where he could sit on a bench and look at the literary and political magazines, having cups of coffee in drugstores, going to the Metropolitan Museum and reporting in the evening to Clara that he had an unfavorable opinion of the new restaurant — these simple rounds, interrupted by such projects as the Nuremberg Trials, were his fate, and his salvation.

With Henry, forward movements, progress, and commitments were slow to be accomplished but retreats were surprisingly rapid. A month or so after Clara’s dismissal, he began to hint of his desire to move back alone to his old hotel on Fifty-seventh Street. Clara could not make the effort to stop him. She tried at first to insist that he remain, but her pleas had, even to her own ears, the sound of some humiliating banality or of bits of badly composed dialogue. To make scenes, to cry, to beg were impossible in the face of that peculiar wisdom, that civilized, suffering extremity that was Henry Dean. “I know now,” she said, realizing that his departure was inevitable, “what ‘gone before you know it’ means.”