The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (16 page)

“You make my entrances and exits seem like those of a leaf blown in and out of a window,” he said. “I guess my destiny is no more remarkable than that, when you come down to it. The obscurity of the leaf!”

“There is nothing more remarkable than your obscurity, Henry,” Clara said, without muting a clear note of discouragement in her voice.

Henry’s old hotel, in a burst of sentiment, arranged to give him his former room, and he, wryly smiling, unpacked his Lautrec poster, his riding boots, his silver tennis cup, and his violin case while Clara watched. She had come along to help him settle in. “You’ve been heroic, dear little girl,” he said to her affectionately. “It is only a temporary thing.”

“Mmm...Permanently temporary,” she said.

Henry made no comment on that remark. Instead, he said, “I’ll probably go to pieces without you, but I think this separation will be best for both of us. I do hope — in sorrow and solitude, as the poets say — to pull myself together, get some work started at last. And now goodbye, my dear.” Quietly and firmly, he led her to the door.

1956

Willard Nesbitt marked his place in
The Power Elite
with a matchstick and put the book on the table beside his reading chair. Nesbitt was a handsome man, with a brisk, trim, lecturing air about him both in and out of his classroom. He was a professor of American history at the University of Chicago and well known beyond that for his books, his round-table discussions, his articles in the Sunday
Times
. He was clever, had easy, rather flippant manners, and treated the academic world as if he were just passing through on his way to, perhaps, the State Department or the United Nations. Hidden in his sensible heart was the desire to run sometime for the Senate, like Paul Douglas.

Nesbitt put down his book with an ambiguous sigh. He found it very difficult to like anything with his whole mind. He was always being disappointed, even in the best. Laurence Olivier’s Hotspur turned out to be not quite as vigorous as he had heard it was; David Oistrakh’s violin playing left him with a sense of imperfection hard to define; he had expected there would be a lot more in Dr. Jones’s biography of Freud than he found; and he thought there might well be a lot less on every subject from Arnold Toynbee. Professor Nesbitt rejoiced in his failure to concur with the common opinion; he cherished his dissents and worked to refine and elaborate them as if they were a piece of historical composition always going to press. When he said, hesitating and smiling slyly, that de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
was immensely readable and would cause less trouble if thought of as a sort of poem, his students were charmed by his impudence. The theme that went the campus rounds, year in and year out, about Nesbitt was that whether one liked him or not, he was at least alive.

Henrietta, Willard’s wife, looked up from the crossword puzzle in the
New Statesman
&
Nation
. The Nesbitts were expecting guests for dinner — Henrietta’s cousin Dodo Babcock, and a colleague of Willard’s, Clarence Anderson. The Nesbitts had known Anderson for five or six years. They invited him every year to several cocktail parties and small dinners, and yet they did not especially like him. The invitations were sometimes to be laid at the door of Clarence’s condition of bachelorhood but more often to something demanding and disturbing in the man himself. Willard, if a number of months had passed without his making any special effort over Anderson, would begin to experience a feeling of unease, of neglectfulness vaguely dangerous to his own well-being. Anderson’s themes were a devotion to academic life and a claim to be a nature molded by the habit of idealism and disinterestedness. He played upon these themes gently enough, but with assurance, leaving his auditors with the feeling of having been accused of something less than perfection.

“I dread seeing Dodo tonight, somehow,” Henrietta said.

“All that branch of your Babcock relations fills me with gloom,” Willard answered. “They have suffered the most fantastic collapse. The strain seems to have undergone a queer fatigue, as even metals are said to do. Or so I’ve heard.”

“Metals?” Henrietta said sharply.

Willard went on, in a musing tone, “There is an element of mystery about this generation of Babcocks. They present with a good deal of clarity the ancient debate between environment and heredity. Their parents were so gay and rich, and the children are so melancholy and undistinguished. They haven’t even got money.”

“Yes, they do seem rather languid,” Henrietta agreed. “John and Evelyn have tried them all and given them up, though I think they admit that young Perry is good fun upon occasion.” John and Evelyn were Henrietta’s brother and sister-in-law.

“But they think Perry’s wife is awful. I distinctly remember Evelyn’s saying that,” Willard offered.

“I believe she thought it was
Dudley
Babcock’s wife who was so awful,” Henrietta said.

“Each in her own way, perhaps.”

Henrietta Nesbitt had been born a Babcock. In Chicago, the name of this family rang out with a clear and beautiful glory. The founder of the family had made a fortune in the copper mines of the West; copper sons had married Chicago meatpacking daughters. Henrietta’s branch of the family had never been as rich as Dodo Babcock’s branch. Now both branches were of unexceptional means, though among the more distant cousins there were still Babcocks of large fortune.

Willard Nesbitt took pride in making no use of Henrietta’s connection with the great and famous Babcock family. This was not the act of spiritual renunciation he sometimes imagined, since there was not a great deal of personal advantage to be gained from the connection; the advantage, such as it was, was purely aesthetic. Willard, straining to keep the proper degree of faith with what he described as his own “fabulously simple” beginnings, felt that the absence of material benefit from his marriage gave him the right — even the duty — to make creative use of his special knowledge, through Henrietta, of the decline of certain members of what he liked to call “the ruling class.” On an intimate and yet ironic note, he sometimes declared he was less fascinated by the living Babcock fortune than by the dead one — those riches gone like a dear person, or buried by destiny like a once thriving village crushed by disaster. The financial decay of some of Henrietta’s relatives served Nesbitt as fresh fact from which theories might be drawn.

“It’s damned risky having Clarence Anderson to meet poor Dodo Babcock,” Willard said, with a sigh.

“Do you suppose he’ll be wearing his black loafers with the tassels on them?” Henrietta said.

“Of course, and God knows what to match. These English teachers are all Cockneys at heart, secretly in love with Princess Margaret.”

“Poor Dodo,” Henrietta said. “She has a faded regality, but her housekeeping is like a Puerto Rican’s.”

“‘Faded regality’ — monstrous phrase. Probably accurate.”

“Don’t you like Clarence Anderson
at all
?” Henrietta asked lazily. “If not, why do you see him?”

“I always expect him to be something like Thorstein Veblen. You know, he’s Norwegian, and from one of those states out there — Nebraska, I think.”

“He probably does go in for ‘pecuniary emulation’ — or whatever Veblen called it,” Henrietta said, with a smile. Nesbitt had been educating Henrietta for all the years of their marriage, but he did this without earnestness, because he was proud of his wife’s somewhat destructive natural brightness and not ashamed of her ignorance. The frightfully poor education of the well-bred society lady was a topic they often discussed. If Henrietta thought, as Zola is said to have thought, that Charlemagne lived and flourished around the fifteenth century — well, that was amusing. With her frightening gift for mockery, her disarming self-confidence, she at least did not have to talk cant, and that was worth all the education in the world. Or usually worth it. Willard had had occasion to feel Henrietta’s bite sink into some sensitive spot of his own being.

“It certainly is hard to make the grade with you,” Henrietta said, after a pause.

“Well, some few do at last succeed with me, but rare is the bird that meets with your unqualified praise,” Willard answered in his most affectionate voice.

“Don’t be ridiculous....Please don’t be over Dodo’s head tonight. It’s bad manners.”

“But it is impossible not to be over Dodo’s head. I thought manners was the art of the possible — or is that politics?”

“It can be cow-milking, for all I know. Dodo has her own peculiar backwardness — that I admit, since one must. But she’s not stupid.”

“I like old Dodo,” Willard said, retreating hastily. (Henrietta did not like to be pushed the whole way in her condemnation of her family. Sometimes, if they drank too many martinis before dinner, she would turn upon Willard and say, with profound intent, “You know nothing whatsoever about people with money and power. That you can go about all over the country, and on television, sounding off on the subject completely amazes me!”)

“Do you think Dodo will be annoyed that we haven’t asked someone more fancy than Clarence?” Henrietta wondered. “It’s been such a long time since we’ve had her over I feel a little stingy not to be making it more of an occasion. One of the ways in which Dodo is absolutely unique is that you can’t flatter her by intellectual appeal, so Clarence
as a mind
won’t mean a thing to her. She’s an old-fashioned girl — money and position speak louder to her than all the artistic or cultural honors in the world. Mother, for instance, is quite different. When we asked her to our cocktail party for that dull friend of Albert Schweitzer’s, she was beside herself with joy and excitement.”

“Actually, there is no one in Chicago fancier than Clarence Anderson when you come right down to it.”

The Nesbitts had a four-room walk-up apartment near the university. The place was brownish, shabby, comfortable, stuffed with books and periodicals — all of which indicated, like a workman’s toolbox in a hallway, the life of the occupant. At the Nesbitts’, there were also a few surprises, the most surprising and important of which was a huge abstraction done in the manner of Jackson Pollock. “By a very gifted young Chicago painter, a friend of ours,” Willard would say by way of identification. The Jackson Pollock disciple had turned out to be a disappointment to the Nesbitts. He seemed to be becoming less known rather than more, but they did not take down the picture and store it in the basement, as the museums do. To be snobbish about Chicago painters seemed to them ludicrous and dull, like protesting about baseball or television. Among their other possessions were a magnificent silver tray, nearly as large as the abstraction, and a badly restored portrait of
Aunt Mag Pierce
, by Sully, which hung with careful negligence in a not very light corner of the dining room, flanked on one side by a Medici print of Uccello’s Cavalry Battle and on the other side by a disk of hammered copper brought from Istanbul.

Just after Henrietta went to the bedroom to smooth her hair, the street doorbell rang. “There they are!” she called out. “Or at least there Clarence is. Dodo is probably still at home looking for her change purse or coloring her nails.”

Willard opened the door and saw that Clarence had arrived first, but Dodo was just behind him on the stairs, calling up to him wistfully, “We are both going to the same place. Of course, I couldn’t have known.”

Clarence had a rather controlled and faraway expression on his face. He loathed being patronized by the Nesbitts. He thought himself much more popular, serious, and clever than they; in his opinion, Willard was something of a charlatan, and Henrietta came under his suspicion as impertinent and shallow. Since he harbored these disparaging thoughts, the feeling he had that the Nesbitts, even at their friendliest, were somehow snubbing him made him rage with irritation and resentment. His dream was that he might get the jump on the Nesbitts — in some subtle, fascinating, and morally plausible way soar above them. That was the desperate hope behind his cool and stiff expression when the door opened.

Willard, seeing that Clarence
was
wearing his black loafers with the tassels on them, smiled and bowed. An amused and condescending look came involuntarily over his face — just the look that Clarence detested, and called “the hard-hearted Nesbitt smile.”

When Dodo joined them, Willard said, “I don’t know whether Henrietta told you that her cousin Dodo Babcock was dining with us tonight. And here she is.”

“How do you do?” Dodo said, calmly inspecting Clarence. “I came by taxi for fear of being late. I hope I’m not.”

“You’re in perfect time,” Willard said. Dodo was impressive in a dress of purple silk and a little cape of black broadtail. She did not look smart — the cape was worn in spots and the dress was not new — but she did have, resting upon the solid foundation of her privileged childhood, an awesome tranquillity, a quaintly pure and steadfast self-confidence. Her gaze was fresh, open-eyed, and self-esteeming, in the manner of a family portrait.

Clarence felt tricked and uncertain when he recognized the clear tremble of interest that flowed through him as he was presented to Dodo. He had not expected a relative of Henrietta’s, an unmarried lady, clearly near his own age of thirty-eight. His mind, always painfully alerted by piercing longings, and his flirtatious heart leaped up to greet the complications and possibilities of the situation. He smiled, carefully measuring his gallantry.

“Dodo, darling, how are you!” Henrietta said gaily, coming out of her bedroom in a hurry as her guests entered, acting as if she had not expected them so soon. Henrietta hated to give the impression of being ready and waiting for anyone, and this led her to assume a flustered and brightly rushed air when guests arrived, even though she was, behind the busyness, prompt, efficient, and quite prepared to receive them. “You two have been introduced, I gather,” she added, smiling brilliantly at Clarence and giving him her hand.

“You’re looking awfully well,” Clarence said, deciding to pay Henrietta, rather than Dodo, his first quietly uttered compliment.