Twice Told Tales

by Daniel Stern

  I’d never thought much about the future, never thought I could parlay the small-time stuff I was moving around into some big hit, never even thought I’d get Lois Wan to leave Jeff and marry me. In fact, I realized now, looking at a story I seemed to have written, with a beginning, a middle, and end, that I’d never made any planned connections. It had all been so heedless until Gideon. Blind alleys of days and nights, mixed motives, missed chances, a jig-saw puzzle with a few key pieces always left out.

  But this was different. I began to get excited as I riffled through the pages. The comments didn’t trouble me so much now. In fact they got my adrenalin going. I would insert Wiggy’s letter there, right there, to give a stronger spine to the scene. And that remark about feeling safer with oriental women—that could be said by another character for a grittier conflict.

  It was as if I saw the chaotic stream of my days and nights through the eyes of some super-Gideon; some giant cloud-face of an editor, like a special effect in a movie; a cheap, cinematic point, the great editor-in-the-sky shaping the drunken progression of dumb experiences into some sense: beginning, middle, yes even maybe an ending.

  Nothing was exempt. Even the cold commercialization of it all into a would-be bestseller—I saw that Gideon insult, which had so pissed me off, as a perverse act of faith; a weird conferring of grace as only that imprisoned, imprisoning wonderful son-of-a-bitch could confer.

  It extended much further than just putting an okay stamp on my haphazard career on the fringes of that war—the war which had made a lot of people sick, some mad, some dead, and some rich. It went all the way back to the sense I’d always had, but never admitted, that my kid sister had died instead of me; that it was my fault. It was a stupid car accident, so I know it’s a wild idea. I mean she was crossing the street and I was downtown in school. But you can’t know a thought is crazy until you put it in place, admit it, and hook it up to other thoughts, other places and people.

  My mother calling it a judgment of God—as if it made the senseless smash-up of a little life more acceptable, if you brought God into it. I hated the idea, God judging seven-year-old kids. I knew she meant my father and his women at the factory, but that was just as sickening. Any way you took the death of my kid sister as anything but random was awful.

  Strangely, it was Gideon’s surprise dying that seemed to put all of these things into some ranking. The way he’d insisted on putting the gains and losses of what happened to me in the Far East into some order—all the deaths and betrayals organized into fictional order: the events moving forward, the characters flat or round. His being dead made it possible to feel things settled. That was an unpleasant notion. My mother had my sister settled into heaven. But Gideon’s dying and poking at me and my manuscript, now that I could no longer poke back, was urgent, continuing.

  In a feverish scribble I began to jot down items.

  The impossible accident of making love to Lois Wan in the American Embassy, when anyone could have walked through the doors and discovered us.

  Finding myself seated opposite Gideon’s wheelchair and realizing how important it was to me to please him.

  The very first day Jeff asked me if I would drop off a package at a bar near the harbor and would I please not ask him what was in it.

  I was breathless in the rush of connections, of backward and forward movement. I muttered, “Gideon, Gideon …” like a prayer of gratitude.

  The feeling of shape, of cause and effect, was like a thrill in my blood.

  “Hey, the King died and then the Queen died of grief,” I said and laughed and felt giddy.

  But Kim didn’t hear me because she was going into the living room to answer the phone.

  Brooksmith by Henry James

  a story

  for Muriel Shine

  CELIA MORRIS MET ZOE Lee her first week on campus. Zoe was tall, aggressively shy, with striking shiny black skin and cheekbones set high and angry. She was not beautiful, only large and austere; not gifted as a student, only desperately persistent. Celia was afraid of her for some reason and played with the idea of screening her out of the class. In the end she didn’t have the nerve.

  Everything scared Celia, her husband’s death sitting on her so recent and so heavy. Michael Morris’s death was one of those losses which strike whole communities. It hit me hard and I came into his orbit late in his career and life. It hit all of us—the designers, the writers, directors, the painters, an actor—such as myself—who relied on Michael Morris for more than just professional financial advice. We received from him what I can only call grace: a humane address to the crazy, crushing world of theater and writing and art. If we were so badly struck down, how much more would Celia be wiped out. We watched and waited.

  Celia couldn’t afford to wait. In his caring so eloquently and elegantly for all of us, Michael had not taken care to become rich or even mildly plush. I think that since we all assumed he would always be there for us, he picked up on the loony idea of his own immortality. It was typical of him. The security of the people who made the beautiful things he admired so much was more important than his own. So his financial wit died with him. And Celia, the wife of the attorney-at-law to the arts, inherited the fate more common to the widows of artists and scientists: she was broke. Still dazed by what had happened to her she had to go back to teaching college English at the City University.

  Now all this was in the rough-and-tough days of the sixties in New York. Campuses were crowded, issues flamed on every walk and lawn; the placard and the bullhorn were as basic as books. Through the whirling chaos Celia walked, oblivious. Everyone’s personal history must intersect with the general condition. And if one is more intense, the other gives way. Before the grief of losing Michael Morris, those dramatic campus events gave way. Celia was a ghost haunted by ghosts.

  Still there was registration. Nothing is as real as registration. And nothing rouses the half-dead as well as a roiling group of students raising questions about a class you’ve only half thought through. With relief Celia realized she could still do it. She talked about the need for all kinds of literature, relevant (and irrelevant? she wondered) as well as more distantly applied fictions. She seized on two Jameses, James Baldwin and Henry James.

  This done, she divided the class along voluntary lines—it was the fashion of the hour—and the blacks and Puerto Ricans clustered into one group, the lower middle class and a smattering of middle-class whites in the second. When the session ended, Zoe Lee towered over her, a shadow cutting off her light. She was the first to hand in her paper. Thanks for nothing, Celia thought, staring down the sullen young woman. This is a first for me, Celia thought, hating a student. And one who’s done nothing to me. Grief makes you crazy, she decided.

  It made her drunk that night in a half-hour flat. She sat on the carpet in the living room, shoes kicked off, dinner-less, glass in hand, and tried to read papers. But the room was full of echoes, distractions. In the corner the piano sang silently, sang the Schubert G Major Sonata which Paul Badura-Skoda had played twenty years earlier. (The pianist had been grateful—saved by Michael’s skill from what he’d called his financial death wish.) It became the family joke—all these gifted men and women saved from financial suicides by Michael Morris, a roly-poly British lawyer who loved the artist and the arts so deeply he could see no difference between them. And they loved him back, making his home an oasis of song, poetry, and general conversation which even that confused time recognized as extraordinary.

  Celia built a fire and crowded out music, laughter; all the delicious debris of the past by reading papers. Zoe Lee’s paper jumped out at her. It was awful! The term “broken English,” usually reserved for foreigners, came to her mind. “Writing means to have a thing in which you be told what things mean in the world …”

  God, she thought, this class is going to be murder. She rambled through the two Jameses and chose two stories: “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “Brooksmith” by Henry. She would n
ot blaze trails. She would act out the cliché. The blacks get Baldwin, the whites get James. No illusions with either group. “Sonny’s Blues” was an elegiac tale of a gifted black man and his troubled younger brother who, finally, he could not save. “Brooksmith” was the tale of a butler at one of those Jamesian salons of the imagination, so spoiled by the quality of the discourse at his master’s evenings that he cannot survive the man’s death and all that vanishes with it.

  Some sane, still sober part of Celia knew she was attracted by the echo of her life with Michael. Brooksmith, like dear, round, appreciative Michael, was an artist without an art, attending those who owned and exercised the gifts. These days any echo would do. She took it and fell asleep on the floor in a blur of books.

  The next day she zombied through both sections of the class, assigning the stories and trying not to look at Zoe Lee who, in any case, turned out to be absent.

  After lunch she was almost knocked down in the hallway by Zoe Lee.

  “What … what is it?”

  “I couldn’t get to class.” Her famous icy aplomb was gone. “What was the assignment?”

  Celia told her and watched the tall ghost flee towards the exit.

  C wonders what Z has on her that shakes her up so. They’re as far apart in lives as in the alphabet—though Celia knows nothing of Zoe’s life. She sleeps badly that night and doses heavily with coffee the next day. She writes the assignment briskly on the blackboard:

  SONNY’S BLUES BY JAMES BALDWIN Write eight hundred words on theme, et cetera, et cetera …

  A hand shoots up instantly. Celia’s fears confirmed. It is, of course, Zoe.

  “What is it, Miss Lee.”

  “But you say ‘Brooksmith’ by Henry James.”

  “I said—what?”

  “When I asked you in the hall …”

  Celia is shaken. What a dumb mistake. I am going crazy, she thought. I have to get away. I started working too soon after death. Black is the color of mourning … Z is the last letter of the alphabet.

  You need more time, she tells herself.

  To Zoe Lee she said, “All right,” trying to sound professorially certain. “Have you read ‘Brooksmith’?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Then you do the James.”

  Amazement arrives that night. It is the not vodkas and the heavyweight wine which overwhelm her lightweight tuna fish dinner and leave her lightheaded. It is not a phantasm. It is the fact that the only paper on any topic that was worth a damn was Zoe Lee on “Brooksmith.” Passionate, intelligent, infused with an offbeat but central understanding of the tale, even the awful locutions could not destroy it, could not wipe out Celia’s sense of discovering something, someone.

  “Brooksmith be spoiled by being only part way into the beautiful world of his master Mister Offard. It can be a curse on you, they let you in part way so you can’t go back and they hate for you to go forward.”

  “This is a very good paper.”

  “Good,” Zoe Lee said. Ice! But Celia was hot on the trail.

  “It’s so much better than the first one. Why?”

  “The first was just to talk smart so I could get into the class.”

  “What’s your direction, Zoe?”

  “What?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “A nurse. I have to be a nurse.”

  “I see. But still, it’s so unusual to do such a good paper out of the blue. James is not an easy writer.”

  “I don’t care about your writers,” Zoe Lee said. “I never heard his damn name before you.” Her eyes burned with the blind intensity that had been scaring the hell out of Celia. “I am Brooksmith,” she said.

  And it all poured out. She lived with her mother and three sisters in Bedford Stuyvesant. They were all prostitutes. Her sisters thought she was crazy for wanting a different life. Her mother was in a rage against her, hoping she would fail.

  “I ain’t going to do it and keep on doin’ it for no man I don’t know and just wants my ass—and get beat up like my sister Adelia so she have a hurt in her kidney all the time after. I am going to be a nurse.”

  And she told Celia how she felt spoiled, like Brooksmith. She had no real place any more but she didn’t want to be left behind like him, to die. Astonishing Celia again, she wept. When the white woman tried to touch her hand in confusion and consolation, Zoe Lee stood and towered over her.

  “You’ll be able to do it,” Celia said. “Why shouldn’t you?” She could hear the ring of nothingness in her voice. So could Zoe Lee.

  “Who the hell are you here,” she said. The contempt that rang in her voice may have been precisely what Celia had feared all along, who knows?

  “It’s not your damned class. I can’t hardly do the science class. They the ones I need for the nursing. What the damned shit you know about it!”

  “I didn’t say I know …”

  “Everything come easy to you …”

  “That’s not true.”

  Celia is hurt and feels, at the same time, foolishly formal. She takes a breath and can hardly believe what she is confiding.

  “I’m having a terrible time and you know nothing about it.”

  “I know your man is dead. Whole class knows that …”

  Celia is ready to give up. “That’s not your business.” Control returns. “I will try to help you. I want to help.”

  “Yeah—” Zoe wipes her eyes with a tissue.

  Celia can handle no more of this insane unwarranted intimacy. It’s already more than she’s counted on. She was up to a quick compromise, no more. She feels sweaty, exhausted.

  “Then perhaps,” she says, “we understand each other—and we can go on from here.”

  But going on is always more difficult than it seems. Celia was determined to do the right thing by this extraordinary young woman. We’ve been spoiled, she thought. We’ve both of us been spoiled. She’d arranged a science tutor for Zoe, had given her a good grade in the literature seminar, and, at the last, lost track of her; as one does, finally, of just about all students, even those who raise questions about one’s own life.

  Four years after her first encounter with Zoe, Celia entered the hospital for an operation, nature uncertain. I had called her for reasons of my own; my acting life was drying up to a point I could no longer afford to ignore. I was playing with the idea of teaching drama at a university until a summer stock job came through, and I wanted Celia’s advice.

  When the department secretary told me of her illness I went to visit her. We had not been close for a long time. But I still thought about the old days—the perfect evenings—when Michael was alive. Since he’d died, things had not been the same for me either, not only socially but financially. In fact a lawyer and an accountant had helped get me into precisely the kind of mess Michael was so exquisitely adept at keeping me out of. So, as Freud says of dreams, my visit was overdetermined.

  I found Celia quite excited. “Listen” she said, “There’s a student of mine here. I just saw her. My God, you can’t imagine …”

  “Oh?” The room was empty.

  “Across the hall.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “She’s a nurse.”

  And she told me, lying there in her flowered nightgown, the story of Zoe Lee; just the way I’ve told it here. Then she led me on a foray to find her. Zoe was, as advertised, tall, strikingly midnight-black, and austere. She was making some entries on a chart and looked up at us.

  “Hello, Zoe,” Celia said.

  She looked down at us, coolly. “You know me, Ma’am?” The “Ma’am” must have been an acquired piece of post-nursing-school politesse. “How do you know my name?”

  “You were my student.”

  “What class was that?”

  “English. Your first year. Don’t you remember? You wrote that wonderful paper.” Celia was shaky on my arm; I could feel her rigid, trembling. “It was on a story by Henry James—‘Brooksmith.’ And you told me�
�” I wanted to stop Celia but there was no way.

  “You said—” Celia raised her voice in proud imitation, “I am Brooksmith!” The phrase hung in the air for a moment.

  At last Zoe Lee allowed herself a small smile. It lit up nothing.

  “I remember you. You’re Mrs. Morris.”

  “Yes,” Celia said. “I see you’ve done what you set out to do. You’re a nurse.”

  Zoe permitted herself a nod. “But I never said anything about any Brooksmith. I don’t know that name.”

  “Brooksmith … ?”

  “I remember your class. We read James Baldwin. ‘Sonny’s Song,’ some title like that.”

  “‘Sonny’s Blues.’”

  “That’s right. Well, I have patients to tend.”

  And she was gone. Celia was inconsolable. I saw, too, that she was sicker than I’d let myself notice. She was weak, one eye half-closed. In the next half-hour she reviewed everything: Zoe Lee, her lost Michael, their life together, then Zoe all over again, on some endless loop of memory.

  “How could she have forgotten?”

  “It was only a story assignment to her,” I said stupidly.

  “Oh, no,” Celia said. “You don’t understand.”

  Celia was stuck in the hospital for a long course of treatment. But she made some phone calls for me and during the next few weeks, with her help, I began to mend my frayed life by working as a substitute teacher of drama. Not being a true academic I found myself with a certain unconventional freedom. And, for some perverse reason, I read “Brooksmith”—the little story which had caused such an upheaval in Celia’s sense of things. And, still more perversely, I assigned it to my class. Write five hundred words on the central dramatic conflict …

  More important, I felt a kind of intimate acquaintance with the taciturn British servant. Being exiled myself from my theatrical past—a past which had shed its glamor long ago, but which I still missed—I could understand him. I suppose I felt spoiled in my own way. I’d had my moments. The Times reviewer once said I had a certain grace. And I’d played in Pinter at the Royal Shakespeare a long time ago, and Pinter himself had said I was “strong.” And here I was teaching drama to students whose idea of tragedy was the violent death of rock stars. To push myself on, I plunged into it with a high seriousness, research and all. And made an interesting discovery. I found the buried roots of “Brooksmith.”