Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  Life had struck at her again; but that was its behavior. It struck one blows and as far as outward events and circumstances went she seemed to have had, as she so frequently remarked, as many lives as a cat. The world which had confronted her was very feverish indeed. It invited to change and experiment—everybody running frantically about in search of distraction, and after a nearly unendurable year of trying to master her loneliness and adjust to life and its new conditions she too was caught up in the contagion. There had been that something brewing in her, God knows just what it was, she was over fifty and she discovered what honestly had come to her as a great surprise, that there was as you grew older no letting down emotionally. The hungers and thirsts increased, they struck at one with sharper thrusts. At any rate she used to regard herself in the mirror and see reflected there a not uncharming woman. Yes, she had some power to charm and to arrest attention; a gift with people. If she made an effort she could collect new friends, she could make the acquaintance of people who would interest and amuse her. New York was crammed with men and women one wanted to know and perhaps could. She might, and the idea struck her, she remembers so well one evening when she was feeling particularly bereaved, buy herself a house (real estate was a good investment). She could do it over, live in half of it and rent the other half. She might give little parties. She might make it a center for finding interesting companions—people with gifts and creative talents.

  And so, and so. The heart has a way of renewing itself; life had at all times its gifts and invitations and New York at that quite dreadful moment dangled them conspicuously before the eyes—everyone spending so much money and extra dividends appearing so unexpectedly as one ruminated over one’s breakfast. Why yes of course, that was exactly the thing to do—to buy a house. It would give her something to think about. A home that actually belonged to you—what could make you feel more secure and permanent? It should be west of Sixth Avenue, it must be in the Village proper. And following this decision she got to work at once to search for the new home. Accompanied by that voluble young woman from the real estate office who, armed with keys and authority to let them into houses, to knock at the doors of private apartments and as soon as they entered to begin to act as though the house, the premises and everything but the chairs and tables of the lessor were already in the hands of her client (“you can knock down a partition here, you can throw out an extension there, you can add a bathroom, excuse me, you don’t mind if I open this door?”), she found herself beguilingly employed. It was exciting enough imagining herself leading so many gracious and decorative existences in so many different houses, rooms, gardens.

  Finally she found on Grove Street precisely what she was after—a Victorian house, nothing especial to look at from the outside, brick with a high stoop and ornate ironwork, built probably in the eighties. It had been unnecessary for the real estate lady to tell her a word about its possibilities—she saw them at a glance. The house was constructed according to a familiar pattern and she knew its layout so exactly that directly on looking around she was able to choose her own quarters and dispose of her tenants in the most satisfactory manner. Ah, this was to be hers, she’d thought, as she entered the ground floor apartment. She’d always liked space—here she had it. The two long rooms and an extension; and ah—a garden, a pear tree. She’d knock down the partition between the two big rooms and she’d keep both fireplaces exactly as they were, marble roses and lilies and acanthus leaves intact, and between them she would run up her bookshelves (books she thought and winter—open fireplaces, flowers). Ah yes, and the extension; she’d draw all this space out towards the windows and the garden. You couldn’t knock down the partitions, but you could perhaps widen the doors. Anyway she’d leave them open. There she’d sleep; there need be no visible trace of her dressing or sleeping arrangements, for on the right was a small room she could use for dressing and a bathroom leading from it; and as for the bed, well that should be magnificently disguised. There and then she saw her lovely gracious suite decorated in relation to her fine old piece of needlepoint which she would throw over the low, the comfortable divan, the walls were painted, the curtains hung, books, rugs, lampshades taking up its subtle shades and colors; furthermore, furthermore, the ugly doors would be replaced by long French windows and beyond and through them the pear tree, that spot of beauty and delight, would guide the eye of the entering visitor down the vista of the room to rest upon its shining beauty. My home! she thought, and her heart warming to it and her imagination continuing to embellish it she constructed between the extension and the second fireplace a graceful little stairway and below, white and severe and quite Italian, her dining room with open archways leading to the large, bright, pleasant kitchen—all somehow arched and aired and sunny and filled with the joy of that perennially blooming pear tree. And yes of course, oh yes of course, there were the tenants to consider. Behind the kitchen there’d be ample space (she’d put in a bathroom and kitchenette) for a small apartment at the front which she could rent to a nice neat quiet bachelor or perhaps some unobtrusive woman and upstairs the two floors which she could admirably adapt for renting. She figured out, the real estate lady assisting her, the total yearly rentals and, naturally, much exaggerating the price she’d ask the tenants and underestimating the upkeep and repairs, they added to a total sum of such splendid proportions it appeared the whole exciting venture was not only a satisfactory solution to her problems but an exceedingly sagacious investment of her money.

  What a business the enterprise had been, selling securities, taking out a mortgage, searching the title and, after that, remodeling and discovering that the estimates made out with her contractor proved quite different from those she’d sketched in her imagination. She’d chosen, take it by and large, a man she liked, Mr. Kopf, a fat, genial, moonfaced creature, honest on the whole, inclined to be generous and say he’d throw in this little bit of painting or that little job of carpentry that wasn’t in the contract. But slow, mortal slow. It had all taken longer than she’d figured out. She’d been kept in town through the entire summer.

  She’d enjoyed it, the walk from Twelfth Street over those sizzling sidewalks, lingering in the Square, improvising schemes about the house and meeting Mr. Kopf in Grove Street every morning, scolding him or buttering him up as the case might have been. Pleasant it was walking through the rooms she’d presently call hers, looking out the windows on that tiny plot of city property—her garden, and the summer heat casting over her tree, her garden and on the backs of all those houses, all the little gardens, its peculiar spell—some intensity about it hearing saws and hammers and the voices of the carpenters and plumbers busy in the house behind her and thinking how she’d feel at home in Grove Street.

  It was autumn however before she was able to move in after plenty of brushes with Mr. Kopf, hurry and strain and nervousness. But finally in the late September days there she was inhabiting her house. To say she’d loved it was to state it mildly. What a delight to wake up on those autumn mornings with the windows open listening to those sounds, believe it or not, thought the old woman—hens, a rooster crowing, for what with all the Italians in the vicinity, Antonio’s lot behind that boarding at the junction of Bleecker and Grove Street, where he kept his hens, a donkey and a horse, there’d been something almost bucolic about life in Grove Street. How she had enjoyed getting to know her neighborhood, starting out to market, the smells on Bleecker Street—cheese, oil, garlic—carrying her off and away to streets in Rome or Florence and that bright display of fruits and vegetables on the pushcarts and the stalls outside the vegetable vendors’—a veritable market garden, the lettuces and fruits so freshly watered, sidewalks wet, Italians in the crowds haggling and jabbering away in their various dialects and returning home with her market bag spilling over like an autumnal cornucopia.

  She’d been loath to start the search for tenants. To complicate the pleasures of her new life with business seemed a shame, and so she put it off. Over her furnishings an
d final decorative touches she’d lingered as long as possible. Why she’d never been so extravagant in all her life, though to be sure she’d tried to justify every purchase with one rational explanation or another—this was the place she’d live in for the remainder of her days, and after all she was planning to entertain, to give other people a chance to enjoy her home. And so, sitting first in one chair and then in another, viewing the big room from every possible angle, she’d attempted to think out her decorator’s problems. There was one thing she felt was missing. She’d known it from the moment she moved in—a grand piano. She must have a grand piano; the room cried aloud for it. Moreover it fitted in so well with her schemes for peopling her life with new acquaintances. No difficulty at all in imagining the winter nights with both the fires lighted and some young pianist playing as though he’d been inspired. Ah, she knew exactly where she’d place her instrument—there, backing on the stair rail and behind her softly lighted bedroom, the garden dark beyond.

  And so, and so (it took a month before she bought it) she got her new piano. It looked as well, and even better than she’d imagined. Ah how she used to love to sit and strum upon it. She was nothing of a pianist, but what delight it gave her, lightly touching the keys and how the little tunes she played enticed the dreams. A bit melancholy they were, for there is always a touch of melancholy in the daydreams—lovely, soft and satisfying to the soul; there’d been in them fulfillment of one kind or another. And what, she would wonder as she played, was it exactly that she wanted? Perhaps to be—well, not exactly that, but something similar, a kind of patron of the arts—to have, ah well, you couldn’t use that word, it sounded too pretentious, a kind of salon? No, certainly not that, but to cultivate charming creative people. She had a gift of making others easy with themselves, a gift for entertaining, getting the right kind of friends together. Felix had always told her there was the making of an artist in her. Yes, yes, she had always known it, she had an artistic temperament. Too old to be creative, but—but, there was this way she had with the young—with young men in particular; and if her life had had its bitter sorrow might it not be possible that she could draw on this bereavement? Was there not a depth, a rich fund of understanding—sympathy? Her heart was full, it was flowing over she assured herself, touching the keys, trying to remember a Chopin Prelude, a bit from one of the Beethoven sonatas; and seeing as she played, the curtains by the long French windows (they were just as she had planned them and the pear tree leafless there beyond) move lightly in the breeze that stirred them.

  NINE

  Flotsam and jetsam, thought the old woman, and she beat her breast, flotsam and jetsam. Those were the words, try to drive them away as she invariably did, that came to her mind whenever she thought about her basement apartment. And why should she have gone out of her way to furnish it, taking so much pains to make it resemble the boudoir of an interior decorator? If she’d left it unfurnished there would have been more permanency, the tenant would have had to bring in his bed, his desk and books and chairs and tables and after he’d hired a van and got his things transported, there would have been some obligation to pay his rent and stay. But to go out of her way to furnish a basement and in the Village in those days; why, it had been an invitation to trouble. She began to conjure with the ifs and it-might-have-beens, and again she beat her breast. If she hadn’t rented the basement at all, just kept that front room for herself as she had seriously considered—a little guest suite. It was putting those friends of hers into the two floors above, giving them the duplex instead of keeping each floor a separate unit and just because they’d overpersuaded her, and asking them less than she’d planned to, and then thinking she could make up the deficit by furnishing the basement and demanding a good round sum for it.

  To call it naive was mild indeed. Those discreet and careful furnishings, the pretty Chippendale desk, the expensive rug and hangings, those good prints she’d found and framed with such particular care. Ah, ah, she put her hand to her heart as though her thoughts were becoming too painful to endure. The only things that were apparently necessary in the basement apartments were the beds. Yes they needed beds. They were all that was necessary; and for her to think now of that narrow mahogany four-poster with the box mattress and the handsome spread she’d finally settled on was, she said and caught her breath, too ironic for words.

  Suddenly she began to mutter to herself swift incoherent words, “My dear, my dear one,” as it came back again, the excruciating story, just as she’d narrated it in her novel and feeling it here, here in her heart—memory flashing back those scenes and situations—and seeing that charming boy (“Yes, yes indeed you were, you were charming, beautiful”), letting him in herself that winter evening—the young man with the chestnut-colored hair. There he had stood, hatless and without an overcoat, throwing back his head, trying to brush the snowflakes from his shoulders, smiling, showing his fine teeth, his face responding with pleasure to the warmth and firelight as he came into the room.

  It had been a surprise! He was a most beguiling young man, but she’d been determined under no considerations to have him dwelling in her basement floor. “Yes?” she’d inquired as coldly as possible and implying she hadn’t the ghost of an idea what he was there for, just exactly as though there’d been no sign “Apartment to Rent” tied to the area rail.

  “We meet again,” he’d said and with that touch of impertinence that somehow or other enhanced his charm he’d taken his cigarette case from his pocket and looked around.

  “Yes?” she’d repeated, not so much as offering him a chair, allowing him to stand hatless, covered with snow.

  “Where’s your friend?” he’d asked and he’d outlined with his thumb and forefinger the shape of Felix’s beard, then he’d dropped his hand offering himself, as she had failed to do so a comfortable chair, and with the same incomparable gesture suggesting that she too might like to sit down he’d seated himself and lighted a cigarette. “Sorry your friend isn’t here. He was a good talker. Something to his remarks about Joyce,” he’d said, observing everything around him—the books, the bowl of roses on the desk. “A nice place,” he’d vouchsafed and he might just as well have added as he took her in from head to foot “and you are, my dear lady, an extremely attractive woman. I like your gown and the sleeves showing your pretty arms. I like your dress. Gray becomes you.”

  Ah well, ah well. The old woman sighed and a look of infinite tenderness flitted across her face. She mustn’t linger too long over that conversation. She’d recorded it, she felt sure, word for word in the manuscript. Ah, but the intimacy, the warmth of it—the two of them there in that beautiful glowing room and the snow falling so fast outside, the firelight casting shadows on the walls and ceiling and playing over his perfectly delightful countenance. “Young man,” she’d kept saying to herself, “I am simply not going to allow you to inveigle me into giving you my basement apartment,” knowing perfectly well that he knew, though they’d not so much as said a word about it, she knew what he was there for and had firmly made up her mind not to let him have the room he wanted. Plain enough to see that he was playing for time. “Give me long enough” he seemed to be saying with every word and gesture “to melt away, well, if not all your objections, at least every vestige of your resistance to my charms.” There’d been a playfulness and humor about the situation which curiously enough they’d both of them enjoyed.

  Finally he’d come right out with it. “Now,” he’d said, “tell me, why is it you’re so determined not to let me have a look at that room in the basement?”

  “Oh,” she’d parried, “oh, my basement?”

  “Am I so objectionable?” he’d asked.

  “No, no, not at all,” she’d assured him. “Quite indeed the contrary.” But she had already made up her mind not to rent the apartment to a young man—not to any young man.

  And suddenly he had laughed and she had laughed. Wasn’t it foolish of her then, he’d inquired, to rig up that sign and hang it
on the area rail? There were plenty of young men in Greenwich Village searching for rooms—best place in the world to put them, they could come, they could go, keep whatever hours they pleased. “Why,” he’d said, “you’ll never be the wiser, never lose a wink of sleep.”

  And thereupon she’d laughed outright. “But I want a lady,” she’d explained. “You wait till you see the little place. It isn’t for a bachelor at all, it’s for a single lady.”

  Well, if she was looking for Bernard Shaw’s Prossie he’d said and they’d continued to laugh, why hadn’t she advertised in The Churchman or gone to the ywca to put in an application. “Your procedure is, my dear lady, if you’ll allow me to say so, extremely naive.” And so there they were laughing together. Was it at his wit or at her folly in putting up that ridiculous sign or simply the fact that he knew perfectly well that she knew she was caught. “Oh come,” he’d begged her, and he’d risen, “let me take a look at the place. What possible objection can you have to a young man at work on his first novel? Is that such a disreputable occupation?”

  “That depends,” she’d said, bursting again into a laugh (he had a faculty of making her say the silliest things) and all at once and to her astonishment she’d seen that he was moving toward the little staircase.

  “Come, let me see the flat,” he’d urged.

  “But that isn’t the tenant’s entrance,” she’d reprimanded, “— the tenant can’t go through my apartment, my dear young man.”