Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  When he’d walked home with her that night she’d hoped, contrary to her accustomed desires, that he would stop in the midst of their conversation and say as he had done so many times before, his arm thrown out stiffly, the fingers held together, the thumb at right angles with his hand, “Margaret, will you marry me? I love you deeply. I feel quite sure I can make you happy.” But he had done nothing of the sort, walking west to Fifth Avenue through the soft summer night and up the avenue to Twelfth Street with that wash of cool moonlight engulfing them, he’d gone on about the laundry workers and Mary. What a remarkable woman she was. Why, when she’d worked in those laundries, he’d had it from a reliable source, not a one of those women with whom she’d been associated had so much as suspected that her background differed from their own.

  “More than you ever could have done,” he’d said, and at her door he’d left her quite abruptly.

  She’d let herself in and walked up the two flights to her apartment, and when at last she’d got undressed and into bed there she’d lain, feeling as though she’d walked all day through a long, incredible dream. Today, she’d said, and yesterday; tomorrow. The strangeness of life had overwhelmed her, and there had been that pear tree in full bloom drenched in moonlight standing up between the clotheslines in a yard on Eleventh Street. It had seemed to her she had never seen a sight so naked, forlorn and lovely. Suddenly and to her surprise she’d found the tears were streaming down her cheeks, She’d stretched out her arms in the direction of the pear tree. “Give me back my child,” she’d sobbed.

  FIVE

  If Felix had asked her to marry him on that night in May she would most assuredly have said yes and on the impulse of the decision and with that need upon her to shed her past she would doubtless have started off in his company the very next morning to procure the marriage license and gone with him as soon as possible to find a justice of the peace to pronounce them man and wife.

  Strange are the vagaries of chance. He renewed his invitation on many other occasions, “Margaret, I love you profoundly.” She could hear his voice now and see the look that used to suffuse his face, the pupils of the eyes dilated, the forehead and the cheeks noticeably flushed; his hands trembled and his voice shook. Whenever she saw him so overcome by emotion and sensed the depth of the passion she aroused in him she would invariably say to herself, no, no, I can’t go through with it, and she would say—(it had become almost a formula) that she was too old for him; he should find a younger woman; and moreover, she tried to state it as gently as possible, she was not in love with him, nor did she feel inclined to fall in love with anybody. Sometimes he would cry out with undisguised bitterness that she was a cold and passionless woman.

  She’d treated him abominably, taken all he had to give and given nothing in return. She must have made him suffer cruelly. It was better he used to tell her to have her on the terms she imposed than not to have her at all. And so it was that their companionship continued. It is only in looking back upon it now that she begins to realize his persistence was founded on the hope that his devotion might become so necessary to her that she would eventually change her mind. He pursued her thus for nearly twenty years and in his company she enjoyed New York in the most free, familiar and delightful fashion.

  He was, like many Jews whose sense that they belong nowhere in particular makes them as much at home in one place as in another, a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan. He was determined to extract from the city in which he lived the very best it had to offer. There was a kind of arrogance in his demand for excellence. He seemed to be perfectly at home with all the arts and his response to them was sensitive and fastidious. A man untiring in civic duties, a busy lawyer, where did he come by so much knowledge of music, art and literature? Did he pluck it from the air—was it bestowed upon him at birth? she would ask him. His answer was interesting and profound. “We are born old, my dear.”

  Yes, that was the key to the riddle, she thought, and seemed to see her old friend again, the slender, asymmetric silhouette, the abrupt gestures, the arm thrown out stiffly, the long fingers, the long face, the pointed beard, his resemblance to some youthful figure in the old Assyrian bas-reliefs. Well, his looks belied him; he had escaped no iota of his heritage. He was born very old indeed. There were realms of his spirit which she was inclined to think she could not even imagine. He had given her a liberal education, free instruction in the arts and humanities. When they went to concerts or exhibitions together she had the curious impression that he had heard the music—seen the pictures many times before, that nothing was new to him and that he was incapable of a purely fresh response; whereas with her, dear me, exactly the opposite was the case. She had had, with him for her interpreter, a sense of seeing and hearing everything for the first time.

  She and Felix enjoyed New York tremendously. To remember certain places is always to be accompanied by him—the Metropolitan Museum, Carnegie Hall, Central Park on Sunday afternoon. To think of one of those high, uncovered Fifth Avenue busses is actually to be sitting on the front seat beside him engaged in animated discussion, clinging on to her hat, the breeze in her face, the bus plunging and lurching like a spirited horse beneath them. From that vantage point on how many hot summer evenings or afternoons in spring they had viewed the city together. The sky was then uncrowded with the great midtown skyscrapers. There were no towers in air, no tiers of windows in the clouds. There was the recessional architecture and they caught glimpses of it down the side streets and the prow of the Flatiron Building pushed aside the traffic at Twenty-third Street and appeared to be sailing straight up the Avenue as they descended upon it. You had a sense that the city was growing like a giant. You had belief in it—confidence. The terror and awe that inspired you today was absent. Instead there was an excitement—expectation, a feeling which she knew she shared with Felix, almost of owning it—certainly of feeling for it some responsibility. Their firsthand knowledge of its slums lent strangely enough a special edge and sharpness to their enjoyment of its areas of pleasure and delight. To be as much at home in Hester and Elizabeth Streets as at the Metropolitan Opera House or on Fifth Avenue was somehow to feel for it a very special kind of love and devotion.

  Something was in the air, some connivance with the future, a naive feeling that they were assisting personally to improve the world. God knows just what it was. She believed in what she was doing. It seemed to her that every time an Italian working girl joined a trade union there was a feather stuck in the cap of progress and reform, and when any of her Italians were out on strike there she was at strike headquarters making speeches, urging them under no consideration to turn traitor and become scabs. “Donne Italiane,” she’d begin, invoking them to march breast to breast with their Italian sisters, for only in numbers was there any hope of bettering their conditions and their lives—all for one and one for all. Felix came to listen to her. He admired those speeches extravagantly. He used also to go with her into the worst of the tenements she visited—a kind of self-appointed truant officer. He assisted her in getting those miserable little slaves of industry back to their schools again. Heartbreaking were the scenes they witnessed. They wrote reports and articles. Wherever they could wax indignant, wherever they could try to “do something about it,” there it seemed to them they were helping to build their city on the hill.

  Take it by and large, Felix was the most interesting man she had ever known. There were many layers in him of sensibility, intellect, and emotion. She could meet him on so many different levels of experience. What they enjoyed most was dining together in a leisurely Bohemian manner. They did not then drink any of the present alcoholic favorites—generally beer or a bottle of wine. They smoked a great many cigarettes, drank a great deal of coffee and talked late into the night. They were familiar with each other’s tricks of thought and conversation. That tightrope on which she’d always seemed to walk poised between humor on the one hand and tragedy on the other, treading it lightly, like a dance on air, was a line not quite d
iscernible to him. His tragic sense of life was on a deeper level, he kept it in a compartment separate from his laughter, and what she was capable of finding extremely humorous he often relegated to the department of his grief; and this because there burned within him a deeper passion for perfection. It was humanity that troubled Felix. He could not separate his ancient tragic knowledge of the human heart from his faith in what a just society might accomplish in making men good as well as happy. His kingdom of heaven was like Christ’s situated right here on earth.

  There had been that night she remembers with especial poignancy when she had almost but not quite been able to break down and tell him the secret that she had kept so long. The scene comes back with all its urgency, that need to speak so strong upon her. Little Bohemia on Second Avenue, the outside door opening and shutting to let in the cold, the lights of Second Avenue bright through the windows and that little old man playing his violin standing right up in front of them; over and over the familiar waltz from Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance” and that handsome boy blown in on a blast of cold air carrying a tray of violets and gardenias; Felix buying gardenias, violets, burying her face in them, “Oh, how lovely”—breathing the draft of perfume; then that conversation infused with the fragrance of the flowers. “Something about you that reminds me of a child”; the old man with the violin stepping closer, the “Invitation to the Dance” continuing; “You’ve never lost your sense of wonder, you respond to certain things with all the freshness of a child.” And suddenly her telling him about those flowers in the woods, the fields in summer, and how she’d stood before the waves; and all the time that powerful desire to let go, to tell him everything—her love for Lucien, the birth of her child, giving him for adoption; his saying “But that is pure Wordsworth, Margaret—‘moments in the being of the eternal silence’—is this enough for you?” her answering “Yes, yes, it is enough,” longing all the while to come out with it, to tell him everything, but telling him instead of that experience she’d never told a soul—how once in Italy when she was trying to recover from an intolerable sorrow she had found a volume of Wordsworth on a hotel table and how she’d opened it and for the first time read the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” and how the effect on her had been instantaneous, how the meters and the movement of that marvelous poem, like the measures of a dance had carried her straight back to childhood and to those moments of which she’d spoken, the words had been for her the declaration of a creed, they had established in her heart a faith; and there was that little man still playing the familiar tune and the ineffable smell of the flowers hovering around them and Felix laying his hand on hers—drawing her hand away quickly, fearful lest she break down and tell him everything.

  There had also been that night the following August when the words “Yes, Felix, I will marry you” had actually been moving through her mind while he begged her so earnestly to reconsider her decision. Luchow’s the night the First World War broke out in Europe—sitting by the open window, a stifling heat upon the city, newsboys shouting “Extry! Extry!” a tension in the air like waiting for a bomb to burst, Felix white and stricken. “It will be long, we’ll all be in for it. People like you and me will suffer, Margaret. There will be times we’ll be unable to endure it. We shouldn’t be alone. We could be a comfort to each other”; hearing the voices crying “Extry, extry,” seeing his face so white and stricken and people getting up to buy the papers, coming back with them; thinking yes, he’s right, we should suffer this together; but getting off (so firmly rooted in her this resistance, this feeling she could not go on with it) the same worn-out objections; she was too old; he should marry a young woman; he mustn’t, he positively must not ask her again—his getting up and going out to buy a paper.

  SIX

  It had always seemed to her, looking back on her existence, that as far as personal history went, outward events and associations, she had had as many lives as the proverbial cat, one quite separate from the other, this epoch and that, and if she examined her experience it was always to inquire could it be possible to crowd into one human span such a shattering succession of eras and events. The incredibility of it, the accelerated speed with which changes and calamities marched on! Why, if she tried to bring any sequence to her personal story after August 1914 it got so whirled round with history that the only thing to which she could compare the process was a kind of crazy newsreel of the soul—pictures collapsing, colliding, careening madly off into time, into space—faces, personalities, voices—the Kaiser with his plume and helmet, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, soldiers of France, German soldiers, dugouts, trenches, American soldiers, Wilson with his top hat, his lady with her orchids.

  As for the human side of her life in those years of the first great war, they were still so poignantly associated with Mary that to think of them was to live in them and through them all with her—standing on curbs and street corners with her, watching the young men pass. How those old tunes to which they’d marched, with their enormous emotional content, carried her back to the hour and the mood. That sense she’d had after the long waiting, the fear that war might after all not be declared, the strong conviction that this was a just war in which one should be willing to sacrifice one’s son came surging back to her, for she too had had her personal stake in all of this—did she not also have a son of fighting age? “Over there, over there”—“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go.”

  And even while that music and those words assailed her she heard again those bells that rang on that November day; she lived again through that fictitious peace, sitting there at lunch with Mary and her little grandson Matthew, the bells continuing to ring, and Mary laying down her napkin, their looking at each other, uttering the word together, “Peace,” each rising from the table and running through the hall to the front of the apartment, opening the window, craning to look out; and Matthew there between them, the bells still ringing and men and women running through the street; Matthew sensing the excitement, asking questions. “Peace,” they’d told him, “Matthew, it is peace”; the child seeing the people, hearing the bells, catching something of that high excitement and intensity, insisting “But I want to see it,” while they turned from him to get their coats and hats and he behind them, questioning; “It’s peace, Matthew,” they’d insisted, running to the door, the child crying out “I want to see it, please let me see peace”; leaving him there and rushing into Twelfth Street: the weather cold and gray with occasional glimpses of the sun, not too many people yet assembled, but everyone communicating, passing the word along, running in this direction and in that, not exactly sure just where they wished to be, getting themselves to the subway and presently finding they were in Greeley Square, the big bell ringing out above the statue of Horace Greeley, the pigeons fluttering in confusion and that amazing sense they’d had of being like everybody else a vessel of joy, pouring it out incessantly, the squares, the streets, the whole town flooded with it like some high tide arising; and then that motley, disordered, spontaneous parade somehow or other set in motion, and all marching together in the direction of Fifth Avenue. Into the streets and through the streets, God knows from where, from the business sections, the residential districts, streaming out of the slums, trucks, taxis, wagons, private cars, public vehicles, and on the trucks and wagons all those improvised floats, the Kaiser set up in effigy and people dancing round him, the crowds in the streets gone mad, shouting, weeping, embracing one another, boys in uniform lifted aboard the trucks and taxis, onto the shoulders of the marching crowd, flags, trumpets, paper hats, confetti, all the paraphernalia of celebration instantly supplied, she and Mary borne along, caught up in the contagion.

  The marching songs persisting, the war to end all wars presumably over, there again she was with Mary on Fifth Avenue to watch the troops pass by—the Seventy-seventh Division that had fought so gallantly in the Argonne and Mary’s Martin among them. She saw dear Mary’s face, the eyes closed, the tears streaming (dear Mary who
was dead and little Matthew killed at Okinawa), she saw the boy erect in his brown helmet, shouldering his gun.

  SEVEN

  And then the astonishing years, the jazz bands, the bootleggers, the speakeasies—new morals, new behavior, new indulgences. Everyone seemed somehow to recognize that there had been betrayal. Wilson’s fine phrases had turned to gall upon the lips. The world would not be made safe for democracy, but there was this knowledge hovering around the heart, that the world encroached upon it, was indeed about to enter in with its insuperable problems; a crazy spendthrift will to pleasure was abroad.

  She and Felix spent a great deal of time together. They looked around them in alarm, attempting to adjust to the changes that had taken place in their own hearts as well as in the exterior scene. The restaurants on Second Avenue with their pleasant Central European charm saw them no more. They frequented the speakeasies. An inordinate need for alcohol was upon everyone.

  Just to think of those speakeasies is to get back again the climate of that nervous, febrile time. There were signs and signals, a behavior to which one lent oneself without a qualm, waiting at those grilled doors (uptown the brownstone stoop, downtown the basement area) and the door opening a crack and through the crack the face, the whispers, giving the password and the door opening with the greatest caution and there you were inside the overheated and somehow oversilenced place, certain of your drink. There was all that whispering with the waiters, consulting the menu with such earnestness as though while giving the illegal orders you were making up your mind whether to have soup or antipasto, and then at last beholding with satisfaction that spread undisguised across the countenance that awful bootleg liquor as it appeared, served up in the oddest crockery, upon the table.