Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  Damned dangerous intersection. Were the red lights holding him up or telling him to go? Getting a cartload full of books across Seventh Avenue right here with the trucks and taxis bearing down on him was something of a feat. He might as well be the old junk man. It somehow got him down. Well, here he was. Where did he go from here? Down Morton to Hudson, or through Bedford into Cherry Lane? Again he hauled the pushcart up.

  No more dalliance. He was resolved to show some guts. He’d work on schedule. The first few days would be damned hard. But just as soon as he had dumped this stuff in his new room he’d get right out and do his little stint—extend the hand. It wouldn’t be difficult to pick up a few dollars every day. Think of the material he’d be getting for his new novel, the real raw down-and-out stuff.

  Compare his experience with the knowledge Philip Ropes had got of life—here Adam spat. There was this urgency, this sense of being driven. All the novels, the other young men. All the photographs on the backs of the dust jackets. There were hundreds of first novels—all the handsome young men with the blurbs that blew them up as large as Tolstoy, as large as Dostoevsky. It was like a contagion, some sickness of strife and competition, this chucking about of names and reputations. Why, you could put your finger on the very pulse-beats of other people’s triumphs, everything so public and conspicuous. Life came at you in every direction. It was the hungers, the hungers in the heart were suspect.

  Here now was his chance to slip through Bedford with free access to Cherry Lane. There was something ganging up on him, weighing down his spirits—the anguish of the days ahead, getting into the rut. The whole terrific business of mastering his craft, breaking the backs of sentences, assailed him—just plain learning how to write. What relentless memories, sitting at his typewriter for hours sweating blood, his eyes gone bleary, tired in every bone and sinew, his nerves frazzled like so many snapping fiddle strings, not able to write a decent paragraph, running to the nearest bar to fortify himself with as much liquor as he could pay for, coming back and trying to wrench his style from other novelists. Why, he had at one time mastered all O’Hara’s tricks and mannerisms; he’d copied Hemingway, he’d tried his hand at Sartre, but Joyce was and always would be the master who would drive him to despair. He knew what he was after, he had everything to say; he’d experienced plenty.

  Philip Ropes, what did he know about anything, the little dilettante who couldn’t even type his manuscript, getting Patsy in to dictate, walking up and down and dropping the immortal sentences? Such a handsome fellow with his chestnut curls and his collar open at the neck, a swell face for the dust jackets. Couldn’t you just see that face embellishing the blurbs? Hallo, the Cherry Lane theater—presenting a play by Sartre. He drew up a moment to inspect the bill. Now there was a writer who knew just what he was about, went directly to the heart of the matter. He’d never have begun a novel with reveries and reminiscences, giving you back your streets and moods and memories—far too explicit for that. He would have started off with Patsy in that bed in Jones Street. He’d have described the bed, warm and consoling, and Patsy, beautiful and naked in the bed beside him on that memorable night when all their troubles had begun. He’d have guessed exactly how she felt about Philip Ropes, conjuring up that peerless young man, while she lay there letting him make love to her—vicarious pleasure, that’s what he’d accused her of experiencing. Patsy had denied it. She’d said that she was sick and tired of him and his everlasting analysis, trying to fix up situations out of every moment, complicating everything; there was no freedom, no frankness left, no simplicity. Well, she was right, there hadn’t been. Her every tremor now involved with Philip Ropes; you couldn’t fool him about women.

  Trundling through Cherry Lane into Barrow, down Barrow, crossing Hudson with the lights now in his favor his bitterness accumulated. That tone of voice in which she’d said “there’s your precious manuscript,” the amount of sarcasm which she’d managed to put into those few words persisted. It hadn’t been too long ago that Patsy had believed he was her little genius. What a fuss she’d made about him, persuading him to give up his perfectly good job and stick exclusively to writing. She’d forced him into it. It was a crime for anyone with such creative gifts to use up all his energies on work that he despised. Where was he now? Back with his gi checks and his little course in English. She loved her little geniuses. Well, he had done with women. They didn’t jibe with work. The sooner he was down to good hardpan, the better—loneliness, misery, solitude. That was his receipt. He would with the greatest willingness make Patsy over to Philip Ropes. He could have her.

  Down Barrow to Greenwich Street. He looked up at the houses. Patsy had told him they were so cute. Little red houses, dormer windows. Cute enough. Why shouldn’t he cash that check? After all, whose fault was it that he was down and out? He’d paid the bills when first he’d gone to live with Patsy. He stopped and took the check out of his pocket. Made out to Patricia Smith, signed by Philip Ropes the third and countersigned by Patsy. Quite a story in it, a little story à la Chekhov called “The Check.” Should he cash it, should he tear it into ten thousand bits? He returned it to his pocket. He turned the corner into Greenwich Street. The cute little houses continued; but what a difference! What a dismal street—all these trucks that rumbled past the windows and that big ugly building opposite, United States Post Office, mail trucks coming, mail trucks pulling out. Here he was, one of the little red houses all right but what a dingy look to it. Gardens behind, she’d said, and little dormer windows; cute as all get-out. But what good would they do him—living in the basement? Leaving the pushcart on the curb he climbed the stoop and let himself in with a key Patsy had procured from the janitor (he was presumably Patsy’s brother)—good thing the rent was paid a week in advance.

  God, what a stinking hole. He descended the basement stairs, opened and stumbled through a narrow hall to the front, opened and unlocked a sagging door, and found himself in a dark square room below the level of the street, with a very musty odor. It appeared to be furnished. There were two small windows with an outer iron grille giving on a hatchway. He threw them open. Jesus, what a hole. A closed-up fireplace with a black marble mantelpiece adorned one side of the room, and opposite a cot with a green plush spread and two green plush cushions propped against the wall. The floor was covered with a worn linoleum rug, there was a Morris chair by the window upholstered in plum-colored corduroy, very worn indeed, a wooden rocking-chair, and in the center of the room under a cluster of electric lights a rickety table with a marble top. He went to the bed, felt the mattress, sat down on it, smelled the sofa cushions. Jesus Christ.

  His eyes roamed around; took in a passage between his room and one at the back which presumably opened into that garden that Patsy had boasted of, “all those dear little red brick houses opening on their gardens.” He got up, went through the passage, tried the door which was locked and bolted. There were cupboards and running water—everything necessary as Patsy had said. He turned on the taps; the water ran. Well, he’d be damned. Now, what he’d have to do was pull himself together and get his junk in out of the rain.

  It seemed like an interminable business, dumping first one load and then another, no order about it, helter-skelter, pell-mell, angrily making the trip to the sidewalk and back to his room Lord knows how many times. It was somnambulistic, like a dream he’d had before and expected to have innumerable times again, realizing too that he was just one in a regiment of gi brothers having their little love affair with art and the humanities. Here were these folders (the precious manuscript Patsy had been so sarcastic about). Under the bed with it, safe from the rest of the litter. Well, to what else could you turn your allegiance, if you didn’t turn to art? Perambulating the room, taking up this book and that and his eyes roaming round, it seemed to him he was surrounded by masterpieces, cheap editions, the big Giants, and the smaller volumes. God, the room was filled with masterpieces—translations, anthologies—that banged-up box was stuffed with masterpie
ces, if you turned the right knob at the right moment, they flew into it from the very air you breathed. The records, the victrola, Picasso’s Clowns. Did the fellows making up statistics in the government bureaus get wind of all this, so many gis at this university, so many at that, all his brother veterans attempting to drink from every spring at once? For here was art, the aristocratic, the inaccessible commodity, suddenly made cheap, mass-produced like everything else. You had to hasten, there was a fearful and immoderate haste about it. With the whole of society geared up to the organized production of murder, wholesale slaughter, you had to choose your horse and mount in haste, art and death running it neck and crop.

  Suddenly he seemed to hear again that incredible accumulating volume of sound, and to see the heavens literally sundered to let pass above his head the majestic procession, thousands of planes roaring like express trains through the sky. God, the perfect synchronization, the order and the majesty, morning after morning at the punctual hour, all those bombers on their way to murder old men, children, babies, women, to blow up munition factories. It wouldn’t be so majestic the next great show they staged. Likely to be silent, out of sight, out of sound. Some solitary bomber silent in the stratosphere on its way, God knows where, carrying God knows what infernal freight. Well, stick to the horse you’ve chosen, hurry, hurry like the devil. The race was not entirely reputable either, there were the rivalries, the jealousies, the triumph so public and conspicuous and he saw, though it was the very last thing he wished to see, the picture of Philip Ropes decorating the dust covers, all the blurbs, all the handsome young men who had snatched right out of the jaws of death you might say their little moment of success, flying into the magic beam, gyrating crazily in the public neon.

  God, life came at you from every direction—all the thirsts and hungers that beset you. There was this Babel of voices—literatures, philosophies, distractions—there was the music, wanting to hear it all. It was free now—loose on the air, incised on the rubber discs, canned for your convenience if you had the price for it. Hurry, hurry. And there were the pictures, the exhibitions, the museums, the art shops. No, it was not just the drive to create something on your own; it was these little empires of beauty you needed to build up in your solitary soul, call it culture if you wish to, universal culture, poets, scholars, anthropologists, historians, theologians, philosophers contradicting, asserting, and the musicologists, the art critics, the reviewers—such a babel of tongues, such exquisite distractions, clutching at them all. Good God, thinking you could read, hear, see, get everything all at once, these thirsts and hungers to be assuaged, wanting to drink from all the springs at once, snatching at universal culture, being, as you damned well knew you were, the most solitary, the most lonely individual that ever at any moment in the march of mad events had trod upon the earth.

  It was multitude from which we suffered, all that everybody had to tell us, buzzed around and blown upon by all the conversations and the arguments. Our traffic with each other, what a queer attempt to protect our aloneness. Christ, how we loved our own aloneness. We did plenty of howling about it, it was a central theme of all our art expressions. None the less we hugged it jealously. We were incapable of giving because there was so much within our reach to grab and snatch and gather for our own, our solitary souls.

  Take his relationship to women. Always the same old story. There was Patsy now—her fresh, her lovely body; yet the more he ravished it, the closer he drew to it, the farther she retreated with her loneliness, the more she cherished her little empire of selfhood, extending it, hoarding it up, subjecting each experience to analysis, to some damned way or another of getting wise about herself. It was just this of which she had complained to him about his own behavior. What was it she had said had made her sick of him, sick and tired of this way he had—taking the pulse of each vibration?

  He flung himself down on the bed. He was mortal fagged. This putting the energies and muscles to work on tasks so uncongenial drained the life blood out of him. He’d never set this place to rights. God!—what a hole in the wall—the worst he’d ever had. He buried his face in the green plush cushions. Phooey, how they stank! Imagine sleeping on a bed like this. He groaned.

  My Old Lady—Mol! Why not call her up and ask her to cash this check? Simple enough. Hadn’t he been suppressing his resolve to do so right along? Sure he had. The money was his. It wasn’t as though it came to him from Ropes. It was the payment of a debt. Patsy owed it to him. Why be so stiff-necked about it? Ridiculous to think he could beat it, beg his way until he got the gi check.

  Mol—what a queer, eccentric bird she was. He had a real affection for her. When he came right down to it, he’d have to admit she was the only human being in this benighted city who really cared for him. Absurd she was, caring so much about the bloody world, so dramatic about everything, beating her chest and flashing those astonishing eyes. “If you’d lived as long as I have, my dear boy,” always getting back at him with her age and her experience. She seemed to him, in spite of all the books she’d read and her fine assumption of knowing all there was to know, innocent as a May morning; virginal he’d swear.

  The longer he lay here and tried to make up his mind to telephone, the less likely he’d be to find her in. It must have stopped raining by now. Very likely she’d be out. He got up, and going to the window, craned his neck to see just what the day was like.

  Jesus, you couldn’t see the sky. There above the area railing was the sidewalk and the pushcart, and both quite dry. He supposed he’d have to trundle the old cart back to the ice and wood man from whom he’d rented it.

  Okay, the sooner he was out of this black hole, the better. He searched his pants to find the check, looked at it, put it in his waistcoat pocket, buttoned up his coat. Now to discover if he had some change. Why, he’d be damned. The Lord was on his side. Here was fifty cents, here was a nickel. He’d go out now and find the nearest drug store.

  Mol—My Old Lady—he said, as he groped his way through the dark hall to find the outer door. She’d let him have the cash.

  THREE

  There had been of course, thought the old woman as she reflected on her childhood and the manuscript she was about to read, the two large inhospitable houses where she had been so lost and so unhappy, the Fosters and the Chamberlains and all the rest of them walking about among their splendid properties. But there had also been the outdoor, the open world—certain experiences looked forward to each year, annually repeated and becoming, as the seasons circled round her completing the cycle of the years and memories, the very essence of life and anticipation. Winter and spring, summer and the autumn: yes, that was their sequence in her memory.

  Winter!—it was the cold smell, the no-smell, snow smell, the first flakes falling on the mittens, on the coat sleeves, and never one exactly like another, it was those storms that changed the rhythms of the blood and the behavior of the nerves, the wind blowing the white dust off the drifts, swathing the lawns, whirling the snow up in a great darkness, sucking it like a typhoon into the cloud, sweeping it from the roofs of houses, from the boughs of trees, creating such a dark the flying flakes were lost to sight. The lull, and snowfall seen again, that soft accumulation of the flakes. It was the clear cold days that followed, the glitter of the sun upon the snow, the lambent shadows on the lawn, the fiery incandescent atoms dancing, gyrating by their billions and quadrillions in the air. It was the breath that streamed before her as she walked, the snow creaking beneath her shoes, the numbed face and feet and not a thing to smell but the sharp keen no-smell of the cold. The sudden thaws, the drip, drip, dripping from the eaves, the sound of icicles shattering as they fell, snowballs easy to manufacture, the mittens soaked, the coat hem drenched. It was scent returning to the breath, memory stirring, rain and again the cold and all those crystal exhibitions, groves and gardens, fountains, pavilions, palaces of ice—sights glittering and splendid but unrelated, severed from the flow. And finally, finally, communications, whispers, that
little mesh and maze of sparrow voices and the whir of sparrows wings, the gutters running rivers and the grass exposed, feet sinking in the mud, rubbers sucked clean off the shoes, roots stirring—intimations, memories, buds swelling on the boughs of trees.

  Spring was that swamp where all the violets grew in such abundance, variously tinted, poised and spurred, the large deep blues, those with large white faces delicately penciled, the short-stemmed red variety, and always when she saw them that sense of having been divinely conducted to some secret ground.

  It was that search for flowers in the woods, the spell cast over her, the light dim, the stillness of a place enclosed. Above, the brown buds sheathed in their brown casings casting gloom upon the light that filtered through the boughs, and on the ground to the right and to the left all the adorable green shoots and tendrils, the little antic flowers of the woods springing to life and vigor among the skeletal leaves, the dry dead needles of the pine, ferns pushing their unfurled fronds above the earth, standing about like little wool-clad gnomes in the grotesquest attitudes, stems of the moss tipped with the minutest blossoms. And there on that bed of rusty, far from springlike leaves, arbutus, perfect and precise as stars, pink as though they had been washed in the pure waters of the dawn, peering up at her—kneeling to pick them, burying her face in the evanescent, the ineffable fragrance, that sense she’d had of waiting on some memory, some intimation, of having been—but when but where she could not tell.