The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (19 page)

“Why should I forget it?”

“Well, I mean her situation, her single blessedness, is due to a certain overreaching of ambition and expectation at an earlier date. It is not that she was unmarriageable, by any means. You never know what odd person — what shy girl — will turn out to be difficult to please in the most outrageous and inexplicable way. Her sister Jeannine, a great beauty and wildly popular, was not like that at all. She married at twenty-one, and while Emory is perfectly sweet, he’s nothing to write home about so far as money, birth, personal charm, or even achievement is concerned!”

“Poor Emory!” Willard said. He was extremely annoyed with Henrietta. If anything, she disliked Clarence more than he did!

“I’d loathe having Clarence Anderson seeing a lot of Dodo. Simply loathe it,” Henrietta continued, gathering steam. “He is not a bijou. Not for my money.”

“Maybe that is exactly what he is, at least to some people. Ugh!” Willard said.

“But, loathe it as I would,” Henrietta went on briskly, “I think, from their point of view, they might have a pleasant time together occasionally. Concerts, little dinners, a play. Not too frequently, just once in a while.”

“You’ve got it all worked out. Anyone would think you were directing them in a movie.”

Henrietta was hardly listening. “I always think of poor Dodo in the theatrical way I last saw her on her own ground, in that dreary, soiled little flat of hers. It’s a frightful place, and somehow made all the worse because of bits of heavenly things here and there, all chipped and dusty and battered. The final tableau was wonderful: there was Dodo in an ancient wrapper eating a sandwich of canned meat, sitting under the portrait of Grandfather Perry Babcock, who made three million out West before he was twenty-five — all those years ago.”

“Clarence will adore that note, I assure you. Nothing will escape him, and his additions to the scene will be epical. If he chooses to do so, he can manage to turn Dodo’s poverty into a great spiritual principle. A sort of Christian Socialist impulse will be found to lie behind the waste and poor management.”

“Darling,” Henrietta interrupted, “there’s one thing I believe should be cleared up. By your standards and Clarence’s, Dodo isn’t poor! She has, unearned, at least three or four thousand dollars a year. Unearned and for life, bar the revolution. That isn’t
poor
, really. It’s just poor to Dodo.”

“Yes, I suppose she has something,” Willard conceded irritably. “But, with her, what is unearned is all there is. She couldn’t
earn
her carfare. That three or four thousand is all she’ll ever have. With taxes, and so on, I can imagine Dodo feels pretty strapped and worries quite a bit about the future.”

“How do you know that’s all she’ll ever have? You have much less imagination than our dear Clarence.”

“How do you know Clarence has imagination about what Dodo will have — or has, for that matter?”

Henrietta lit a cigarette and resumed with a knowledgeable air, “At least, Clarence wouldn’t be so positive about a thing like that. He wouldn’t consider Dodo or her prospects mummified. Don’t forget, Mr. Professor, rich people, well-connected people, are always inheriting a little bit here and there. Sometimes more than a little bit will come from an utterly unexpected source — and a greater delight human society cannot offer. Yet sometimes from an expected source nothing comes, or much less than might have. That scars your very soul, believe me....But don’t count out any Babcock while a single branch of the family is as filthy rich as Uncle Wink!”

Henrietta was soaring into her most lofty sphere. “In the thirties, when all the so-called clever people were making so much fun of Ford and Rockefeller and Uncle Wink, I felt, without daring to utter it, that times would change, the swing would come. Right now, I don’t know a single damned sociologist who wouldn’t be beside himself with joy at the thought of dining with Uncle Wink and Aunt Bea! And the conversation would be a lot more diverting than what one hears at the Faculty Club, I can assure you. I don’t deny that it would be different — lighter — but that light sort of thing can, in its own way, be original and interesting. And, above all, gay! God, the charm of a sense of gaiety!”

These aggrieved moods appalled Willard. He felt defenseless, embarrassed, accused. Henrietta struck this note only when she had had too much to drink, and the mood and the language — even the feelings — vanished with the return to full sobriety. And yet how distressing the words were, how resentful, how disappointed and unpredictable! Just beneath the surface of Henrietta’s amiable, witty, and nervous temperament lay this sewer of narrowness and disillusion. Willard shrank from the moments when it was exposed to him. He hated himself for having clumsily allowed himself to be somehow paired with Clarence Anderson in Henrietta’s intoxicated dialogue. Her grudging, preaching, outlandish statements seemed to be meant for both men alike. It was a relief to know that in the morning she would mercilessly make fun of Clarence and praise her husband.

Henrietta was reaching her big scene. She began, as usual, to repeat her refrain. “I find myself overcome with admiration for you academic people — ”

“Really, dear?” Willard injected in a vanishing voice.

“Yes, utter admiration. How you talk about things with such godlike assurance! How you give forth on matters you have never experienced! Ideas flow like wine — everything out of books and other people’s lectures, nothing from actual life! People write
books
on the psychology of the upper classes who have only read other books on the upper classes, or on the peasants — it’s all the same — or on Negroes, any subject you like. There is always someone with the courage to talk or write on any topic under the sun. The brave teacher is always to be found!” Her voice dropped. “And now I suppose our good friend Clarence will join you in the fascinating analysis of the great Middle Western fortunes — in the authoritative statement on the Chicago robber barons!”

Willard shivered. He picked up his book, kissed Henrietta on the cheek, and retired to his bedroom. Thoughts and dreams of Clarence Anderson tormented his sleep.

1957

He’s taken to doing very dismal work,” Johnson Palmer was saying about a fellow-artist. “Something like the Graham Sutherland portrait of Churchill. All wrinkles and bulges — that kind of thing.”

“So?” Thomas Frazier said, with a negligent, burly composure that neither assented nor disagreed. A profound and bullying impudence emanated from Frazier, like steam escaping from a hot valve. In his grunts, his refusal of the older man’s efforts to please, he was clearly making a comment upon the life and work of Johnson Palmer. Frazier, a young “action” painter, was shrugging off Palmer’s conservative, charming portraits of lonely-eyed girls, his nostalgic scenes of summer lawns where some bright, abandoned object always lay sadly in the background. Whatever the merit of the two men’s work, they faced each other in a condition of tribal hostility, like the appropriate antagonism of the Army and Navy teams on the football field.

Palmer was ruddy, freckled, spare, courteous, and handsome, and Frazier was brown, heavy-framed, choleric, boastful, and handsome. They shared only a certain shrewdness — the cunning necessary for poor men pursuing independent careers as painters. Palmer’s confidence, over the years, had become as thin as his color. He was fifty, and Frazier was twenty-eight. The two painters were now meeting through the efforts of their friend Buck Sampson, a teacher at the University of Virginia. In blundering charity and innocence, Sampson had made one of those perilous suggestions that burn the very souls of sensitive egoists: he had suggested that Palmer purchase one of Frazier’s canvases. Sampson had brought forth his proposal as only incidentally a financial aid to the young man; dollars, he felt, were a sort of spiritual coin, a transcendent exchange, when, as in this case, they carried with them a sweet boost to a young, longing, hungry pride. Sampson had not realized the truth, which was that the older painter was a good deal more in need of boosting than the younger. Maturity, disappointment, decline of expectation had settled upon Palmer shyly, like those wrinkles caused by smiling, which are nevertheless still wrinkles. He could say he was more “known” than Frazier, but Frazier had all the fresh bark and bluster, the hopped-up conceit, the blowing bravado of a beginner who had attached himself to a new school.

The meeting was taking place on one of those cool, soft days in late spring. At five o’clock in the afternoon, a thin gray light filtered through the windows of Palmer’s studio, high up in an old stone cathedral of a building on Park Avenue. The studio was one room of the Palmers’ six-room apartment — a place that, they always explained, “came under rent control.” How many jokes, apologies, and explanations this Park Avenue address had laid upon Johnson and Alice Palmer! It seemed to open them to the ridicule of other artists. The apartment had, a good many years ago, belonged to the sister of Alice’s first husband. The rent was sacrificial — “just barely possible” — and the Palmers felt uncomfortably, at times, their betrayal of the tradition of the dusty attic, the freezing atelier, the cheap loft. They laughed uneasily, but still they hung on, remembering that there were those in whose opinion Park Avenue was not a joke but an agreeable asset. When they added things up, they concluded that the scornful painters and the possibly impressed buyers were just about equal in number.

In the apartment, the studio and the living room were side by side, both receiving the light of the street. With the connecting door opened, as it was today, conversation could be carried on from one room to the other. In the living room, Alice Palmer was saying, “I suppose your nice young husband is an abstract expressionist, or impressionist.” She gazed at Mimi, Frazier’s wife, with a mildly intimidating air.

Mimi gnawed an already deeply bitten fingernail. “Yeah, sort of,” she said.

“I have no doubt he’s wildly, fabulously talented,” Alice went on, giving Mimi a nimble, pretty smile. Alice leaned, as a tree may be said to lean in one direction or another, toward a bright, efficient defensiveness. She was alert to the possibility of attack and, at the same time, sure of her preparations to meet it. She was short, fair, and rather round-faced, and had a well-dieted figure, good taste in clothes, and a nature marked by a sufficiency as well distributed as the flesh on her body. The blood of hardworking tradesmen and clearheaded, provident women ran in her veins. There was still something of her original Oklahoma city in her accent, even though she had been in New York since her teens.

In the studio, Palmer continued in the tone of pleasant solemnity he brought to matters of art. “Damn it,” he said, “I honestly wish I could get at this stuff you young men are turning out. I remember a conversation I had with Walt Kuhn before he died. We felt baffled, but willing to admit there might be something in it we couldn’t make out. I don’t mean to say this about your work, particularly.” He glanced uncertainly at the large canvas Frazier had brought, carrying it all the way up from Greenwich Village on the Fifth Avenue bus.

Frazier shrugged his corduroy shoulders. “I’ll grant you one thing, old man,” he said. “We got our fakes in this style, the same as you fellows have in yours.”

Palmer smiled, and decided upon an open, daring line. “This may sound idiotic, Frazier, but — uh — do you consider your own painting, uh, genuine? I mean, does it represent feeling, or simply a manner you happen to find interesting?”

Frazier frowned. “You’re kidding! If a guy’s going in for faking, he ought to be able to think of something more profitable than this, for Christ’s sake!”

“Speaking in general,” Palmer insisted, with a weary smile, “I believe people try to fake high art just as often as they fake for commercial reasons.” Like a peddler whose wares have been turned down all day, he waited, with a look of patient expectation, for contradiction. Palmer was not tired of life — no, he greeted each new day with a good deal of quiet anticipation. It was art he was tired of. He sighed.

“Bravo, dearie!” Alice called to him from the living room.

With this applause, Palmer felt obliged to conclude his reflections upon art — reflections he had voiced dozens of times over the years. Alice never yawned or in any way betrayed her previous knowledge of each syllable of these declarations. “Fame, greatness, fashion, up-to-dateness,” Palmer said, finishing off. “They are just as tempting as money. And the greatest of these is vanity. An infinite number of things can make an artist lose his sincerity.”

“I hate sincerity,” Frazier said briskly.

Frazier was not mean-spirited so much as serviceably coarse, like an old army blanket. He often said, “By God, if you don’t like yourself, in this painting racket, you better close up shop!” His bluster was usually taken in good spirit. People laughed. They recognized it for what it was. Frazier had a boyishly mystical belief that conceit was a necessary condition for artistic success. He was not bothered by “Cézanne’s doubt.” He loved frankness and progressive jazz, and was proud to admit that he wept when his painting “really came through.” He consumed several quarts of milk every day, ate a loaf of bread for lunch, horsed around his studio barefoot, and boasted about his plans.

“Nice little cold-water flat you have here,” he said, after a pause. “Unparalleled view.”

“The address is a little embarrassing for a starving painter — ”

“But the joint is comfortable,” Frazier interrupted.

Palmer stood up to him. “Alice was married before, you see. Her husband died young — one of those grim things — and she had some money from him. It wasn’t so much. We’ve been plenty broke in our time, believe me.”

Frazier was looking idly about the studio, and now his glance rested upon one of Palmer’s portraits, a portrait of Buster Keaton. “That’s not bad at all,” Frazier said, showing his large, white, healthy teeth as he smiled briefly. “The old clowns are all the rage now, aren’t they?”

“Who’s all the rage now?” Palmer asked hesitantly.

“Buster Keaton. All those jokers who go to the Museum of Modern Art movies — in the afternoon, you know — love Keaton. I’m not complaining. I love the guy myself. I suppose you know all the old films?
Dr. Caligari
— the works?”