“Darling, would you like tea or chocolate? The chocolate here is perfectly delicious. Let me recommend it,” she’d prattled on, treating her exactly as though she were taking a child off on a spree.
However, her attention was immediately distracted. The Plaza did not provide the kind of tea that Lucien preferred. There was conversation among the waiters, the headwaiter ran up. “Your Uncle Lucien,” she explained, “since his visit to China, has become a connoisseur of teas.” “Let it go, let it go,” Lucien said, noticeably put out. And as she watched them she had seen a series of small tableaus taking place in hotels and restaurants all over the continent of Europe, waiters rushing up with wine lists, waiters hovering over menus, for what they ate and what they drank had become a matter of the greatest moment to this childless pair. “We should have gone as you suggested to the St. Regis,” said Eleanor. Stealing a glance at Lucien, Margaret had done her best to make what she could out of it all. No, he had not changed too much, grown older of course, and he was rather stooped, but there was still a look of distinction about him, the same fine features and that plasticity about the molding of the face under the cheekbones and around the mouth that showed the signs of suffering. Or had it, she’d wondered, become boredom? The same amber eyes, the same dark mustache. And suddenly there she was saying to herself, while Lucien put his finger on an item in the menu—this was the tea that he would take, “You are part of all things great and quiet, my beloved,” hearing the waves drawing up, retreating from the shore. Did this man know, she wondered, he was the father of her child? No, she came suddenly to her conclusion, he did not. He had no inkling of such a thing. Eleanor was talking to her now of China. “Your uncle knows all there is to know about China. You must see his collection of Chinese pottery. We have it in our villa at Mentone.” He was, she confided, writing or was about to write a book on Chinese art. “Darling,” she turned to Lucien, can’t you tell Margaret something about Chinese art?” But the tea, the chocolate, little cakes and sandwiches arriving all together, she plunged rather greedily at the plate of cakes. “Do try some of these,” she exclaimed, helping herself before anyone else to a large cream puff, “they are perfectly delicious. Nothing I enjoy so much as a good cream puff.” Lucien meanwhile looked critically at the tea. “Little bags,” he said in a voice of great disgust; nothing he deplored so much as tea in little bags. And drinking the good tea (for in spite of all the fuss he had made about it the tea smelled fragrant and delicious and she kept on wishing she had not allowed herself to be bamboozled into ordering that rich, too-heavy chocolate) he began to change his mood. Suddenly and with a jaunty self-conscious gesture he put his hand into his coat pocket and drew out the paper-covered novel she had noticed that he carried. And she might have been wrong but she imagined he was attempting to describe a little circle round the two of them as he handed her the book. “Have you read this, Margaret?” he said. No, she had not; was it good, she asked. He closed his eyes an instant as though attempting to gather up and then express if possible something of the exquisite pleasure he was still capable of snatching for himself and even in the midst of an existence spent mostly in the company of this foolish, garrulous woman. It was remarkable, in his opinion the greatest novel ever written. “But the greatest?” she’d expressed astonishment to think she’d never even heard of it. “Your Uncle Lucien is,” said Eleanor, bridling a little, “a connoisseur. He knows all there is to know about books.” “You must read it,” said Lucien. “You will like it, Margaret,” and he looked straight into her eyes.
She leafed through the little volume. Du Côté de Chez Swann, she read, making a note of it for future reference, by Marcel Proust, and the situation in which she found herself presenting her with such a staggering list of questions, it seemed to her impossible to cope with them. Had Lucien prepared this little incident in advance, placed the book in his pocket with the intention of drawing it out at exactly the right moment? Had he thought thus to tell her that after all he had a life of his own, and that this imbecile chatter was not the whole of it? Was he not somehow or other trying to tell her that he had not actually changed, that this was the same Lucien who had at one period in her life been her mentor, taught her the love of good books, developed in her that passion for poetry that had stood her all her life in such good stead? Was he not attempting to say to her in those few brief words, “You will like it, Margaret,” that he and she, not he and Eleanor, were the pair who really should have spent their lives together? And was he not at the moment experiencing the most excruciating chagrin at having her see him in his role of slave to Eleanor? ‘“You’d love our house in Mentone, you simply must come some day for a visit. It’s crammed with books. Lucien has a splendid library. Haven’t you, darling?” Eleanor laid her hand on his arm. The twists and turns of life, the irony of the moment could hardly be rivaled. Sitting here with Lucien, with whom she had once shared the high comedy of the family scenes, their humorous observations, glancing off from Grandfather Foster to Cecilia and then back again as always to her grandmother, seeing now as she could not but see in Eleanor a creature who somehow combined the salient points of all three characters, her grandfather’s extravagant good looks, his self-indulgent and naive pleasure in the good things of life, Cecilia’s idiotic chatter, and what was really most appalling, knowing her grandmother loomed so large in this sensuous, powerful woman—her indomitable will to command, her eagle eye on every situation. Why, why, it was Eleanor who had known all there was to know, who had herself assisted her mother to keep Lucien in the dark about the child.
But why, she wondered, why on earth this particular meeting? At whose suggestion had that letter on the bright blue paper been sent off? How the questions came at her. She couldn’t beat them off. What vistas seemed to open in her speculations. Had Lucien expressed a desire to see her before they returned to Europe, or might it not have been some extremity of boredom, a sagacious, well-calculated attempt on Eleanor’s part to vary the monotony of their days—those drives and taking tea together every afternoon? After the meeting was over there’d be plenty to talk about. They could discuss it for weeks on end, and since she now felt certain Lucien had not known he was the father of her child it might well be that Eleanor, with the ability of complacent, comfortable people to forget the tragic and the painful, regarded the whole sad story as a kind of midsummer madness, and might even enjoy her chance to show them both, herself and Lucien, that she had you might say won the day.
She gave Lucien back the book and watched him put it in his pocket, almost it seemed to her with resignation, as though to shrug his shoulders—books, his library, this precious little volume, the exquisite pleasure he was still capable of extracting from literature, were his at any rate, even if he was unable to share them with anyone on earth. “But wouldn’t Margaret,” Eleanor insisted, “love our villa at Mentone.” Lucien to her surprise practically took the words out of her mouth, launching out upon a lyric account of the beauties of the villa. It looked right out on the Mediterranean. “The sea comes blue and full,” he said, “over the terrace wall; it floods the rooms. The Mediterranean is the sea,” and he looked vaguely into the distance, “that always seems to be brimming over, full, full,” he said, “full to the very brim.” He half closed his eyes while Eleanor, you could see at a glance that the foolish, worldly, powerful woman was still head over heels in love with him, looked up into his face much as a mother might gaze on an odd, precocious, gifted child. She patted his arm as though to say, “Really, Margaret, isn’t Lucien wonderful?”
But he relapsed presently into silence and conversation had for an instant flagged. Eleanor however, allowing only the briefest silence, transferred her touch on Lucien’s arm to her own. “Tell us,” she exclaimed, trumping up a gush of enthusiasm, something about yourself, Margaret. You must be an accomplished singer by now,” and she looked around the room as though expecting a grand piano and an accompanist to appear at once. “I wish we could hear you sing.”
It had been too much for her, the questions and intimations, and such a flood of memories accompanying them, and now remembering how she used to feel in Lucien’s presence, longing to do something, to smash the plates and tumblers, to throw some kind of bombshell into the midst of all that talk at the dinner table, she did literally throw her bombshell, and with a kind of fiendish, hysterical delight in watching its effect upon the two of them. No, she wasn’t singing any more, she said. She thought surely they had heard she’d given up trying to be a singer. Eleanor was nonplussed. “Not singing? What are you doing?” And it was then she’d shot her bolt. “Why,” she said, “at present I’m swamped—immersed in labor unions.” Lucien put down his cup of tea. “In what?” said Eleanor. “Labor unions,” she repeated. What devilish delight it gave her to pronounce the words. “I don’t understand.” Eleanor was obviously bewildered. There was a big strike on, she explained to them, a laundry strike. She had as a matter of fact taken the afternoon off. She should at the moment be assisting the girls on the picket line. “The what?” asked Eleanor. She reiterated the explanation, “the picket line,” pronouncing the words precisely. Eleanor and Lucien exchanged an outraged glance, and she perceived at once that he had, and with appalling suddenness, as though taking cudgels up against a common peril, joined his indignation up with Eleanor’s. Something indeed was going on between herself and Lucien, a kind of flashing of swords, a crossing of lances, just as though he said to her, “What, you, Margaret? Betraying your own class?” forgetting as he apparently had what in the past had been apparent to them both, that she was not, when all was said and done, and never had been exactly what you might call one of them.
The rest of that poignant little tea party had been all but intolerable. She had shocked, she had wounded, betrayed them. That was the substance of their exchange with her, and though they made an effort to recover a semblance of geniality it was difficult to get on with conversation. Life was, she kept telling herself, a business. She must not allow these little ironies to get her. They were inherent in the social comedy. Life was full of just such little incidents. A remarkable scene, she remembered thinking to herself, for a novelist. What a good novelist could make of such a situation. Why not? What was to prevent her from putting it some day into a novel? She finished her chocolate, Eleanor gobbled up the remainder of the cakes, Lucien allowed his tea to grow cold, and they did their best to turn the dreadful information off with a kind of affectionate banter, an assumption that it wasn’t true, that, being as they still conceived her to be no more than a foolish misguided girl, she would presently become a more disciplined member of society and regain her sanity. And when at last they all got up to go, they accompanied her out of the dining room and through the wide hall to the door at which they’d entered. There had been the liveliest exchange of little jokes and pleasantries, and when it came to bidding them goodbye she was again enfolded in that ample bosom. The invitation was renewed, she must, the next time she came to Europe, come and make a long, long visit to them at Mentone.
And then again, the whole experience was something she had read of in a novel; not her own, oh not her own. Lucien took her hand and kissed it in his gallant European manner, and there was, believe it, she had said to herself, or not, a note of reproach in his voice, as though she had been the one to deal the mortal injury.
FOUR
Phew, Miss Sylvester ejaculated, making, she was aware, exactly the same sounds that she had made that spring evening as, turning her back on the Plaza and the park, she’d walked at a very brisk pace down Fifth Avenue, taking long deep breaths, and presently muttering to herself, “Thank God for Mary and Morton. Thank God for Felix Isaacs. Thank God for my work”; thanking God in fact for everyone and everything able to assist her in the forgetting of her past. And if, thought the old woman, on that particular night Felix Isaacs had asked her to marry him as he had on so many previous and later occasions, she thinks it very likely she would have answered, “Yes, indeed I will.”
But an end to all these ifs and might-have-beens. Let it be, let it be, she said aloud. At any rate she’d walked all the way down to Ninth Street and then east to Second Avenue, and at St. Mark’s Place, in front of the high iron fence that enclosed the tombstones and the old brown church she’d stopped and looked up at Mary’s lighted windows, allowing herself to rest in the comfort they brought her, for Mary’s apartment across the way on Tenth Street, with its spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, its charm and warmth and welcome, had been the place in New York she’d loved the most, and there had been something about it, lingering there looking into the churchyard, the chestnut trees in leaf, the shadows of the leaves and branches thrown upon the gravestones and the church, with Mary’s windows glowing warm behind the boughs. It gives her back in all its fullness, thinking of it now, that brief period before the First World War when in association with a few friends and a great many people of various religions, nationalities and classes she had shared the same expectancy, as though under the ministering direction of all that hope and work and effort one might actually expect to see a better, braver world emerge. A small holding in time, she thought, for was one not at liberty to speak about an era as a home, a bit of spiritual property now demolished and which one had once regarded as one’s own?
She was late, and much to her surprise and pleasure had found Felix there when she arrived. They’d sat down without her and were excitedly discussing the strike. Several young women had been arrested and, according to Mary, cruelly beaten up. One of them was she firmly believed in a critical condition. She had herself laid hold of a policeman and called him a brute and a bully, and he had struck her across the face. Why she had not been taken off in a Black Maria she wasn’t able to tell. She was standing bail for all the young women, and Felix, whose knowledge had brought him in to be of help in the problems arising from the strike and the arrests, had forgotten the legal technicalities and all that difficult jargon and was together with Mary and Martin letting himself go. He was angry and excited. He wanted to get the facts before the public. He was determined to write an article and was questioning Mary, who had, the fine, intrepid creature that she was, worked all the previous summer in a big steam laundry just to see what the conditions were and was telling him about the heat, the long hours, the meager pay.
The windows were open. The smell of the chestnut trees in the churchyard together with the smell of heat-drenched pavements came drifting in. How delicious it was, this first hot summer night, sitting here in Mary’s pleasant dining room with the roar and cry and rumble of the city rushing at her, experiencing this perfectly delightful sense, glancing out now and then at Second Avenue, the bright lights, the restaurants, the theaters, the bakery shops, all those Bohemians, Austrians, Hungarians crowding the pavements, that the whole of Central Europe was impinging upon her. Listening to the conversation, to the outdoor laughter, the voices, she kept saying to herself, this is real, this is my life, these are my friends.
She did not take a large part in the discussion. Every now and then she’d say “How terrible,” “It’s an outrage,” or something of the sort. She was intent on watching Felix. He paced up and down the room, lighted one cigarette after another, questioned Mary, stopping occasionally to make a note of what she said. He was she’d thought a very extraordinary looking man. There was something about him different from most of the intellectual Jews of her acquaintance. He did not have that familiar gesture, the lifting and arresting of the arms and shoulders, assertive and at the same time repressed, as though the impulse towards emotionalism in conflict with habitual repression induced an awkwardness, a kind of bodily malaise. He had a peculiar bodily grace. Tall, blond, with that curious stiffness of the arm, throwing it out abruptly, the fingers held together, the thumb at right angles to the hand. He made her think of those figures in ancient Assyrian bas-reliefs, asymmetric, stealthy, the body under strict control. She had seen the type in the ghetto. It differed from most of her Jewish friends whose Semitism
seemed to lie upon them in a more self-conscious, brooding manner, something younger about him as though he’d skipped the experience of the ghettos and the persecutions and had gone back to the youth of the race. His face was long and pale and he had a blond pointed beard and full red lips. Really what an exceptionally interesting creature he was. To marry him would be an excellent way to begin life anew, to turn her back completely on her past. She’d kept saying to herself, “Mrs. Felix Isaacs, Margaret Sylvester Isaacs.” What a nice, what an extremely interesting name that would be. Or she might perhaps take up Silvestro and assert her Italian origins. Mary was always saying to her, “You’re a perfect fool. What’s the matter with you that you refuse to marry Felix? He’s one in a million. What? You think you’re too old for him? He’s nearly ten years younger than you? Stuff and nonsense. You say you’re not in love with him? What does that matter at your age? Think of growing old and solitary! What devotion, what friendship you will find with Felix.” Watching him intently she’d thought it was perhaps those full red lips above the pointed beard, so sensuous in the ascetic face, that troubled her. Once he had lost control of himself altogether and kissed her passionately on the lips and she had recoiled at the thought of his passion. Passion had been burned right out of her, that was what stood in the way of her saying yes to Felix. But none the less, none the less, after her experience of the afternoon she must forget all that, she must lay herself open to love, to passion. Felix was, there was no doubt about it, a most attractive man.
Many Mansions Page 10
