by Lore Segal
By return mail Leslie wrote, “I have reread your old letter about Nat saying he was ‘the’ poet and cannot understand how I missed the irony. Eliza is in pretty good shape and thinks of coming with me to next month’s New York meeting if you can put us up.”
As the date approached Eliza had become less and less disposed to travel. Leslie came by himself but stayed at the little hotel around the corner from Ilka. He took her to dinner at one of their favorite restaurants. She said, “I’ve come across a Göthe poem called ‘Parting’ which says, Und doch welch Glück geliebt zu werden! Und lieben, Götter, welch ein Glück!”
“Will you translate it for me?”
“Glück can mean either luck or joy. Und doch means and yet, but what I think he’s saying is, in spite of all the crap. So: ‘In spite of everything, the sheer luck of being loved. And, oh ye gods, the joy of loving.’”
Leslie said, “Maggie is at your mother’s for the night?”
“Yes.”
“Can we go to your place?”
There followed years—Ilka remembered them as the halcyon years in which she had written to him at the institute and he returned her letters enclosed in his answering letters, arranging where to meet. They wrote about joy, they talked about their luck. Where had they been and what could she have said across the table, at dinner, that caused him to ask, “Do you expect me to decamp again?” She had had to take time to think and had answered, “I don’t.”
And this from Leslie, the following May: “Eliza says you and I ought to go to Greece.” “What does that mean?” Ilka had written him back. Leslie wrote: “She remembers our sitting around after your wedding, you and Jimmy wanting a honeymoon in Greece. You got pregnant and then Jimmy died, so you never got to go. I have never been to Greece and I want to go. Eliza does not want to go. She suggests we go together.” “I don’t understand,” wrote Ilka. “A gift horse,” wrote Leslie. “She’s either crazy or incomparably generous,” wrote Ilka. “Yes,” wrote Leslie. “Can it be that in another week you and I will be in Athens together? Can we be so elevated? Oh love oh love oh love!” he had written, fifteen years ago. Was it really so? Had this been?
Maggie stayed with her grandmother. Ilka took the opportunity to go on a Hellenic cruise; Leslie, who did not choose to take off more than a week, would meet her in Athens.
In those days the public was still permitted to climb up the promontory and stand and walk among glories, fallen marble, upstanding columns, compared with which other things are only pretty; this is what they said to each other. In their room in the hotel at the foot of the Parthenon they loved each other. It was in the air on the flight home to America that Leslie died. Back in New York Ilka fell into an exhausted sleep. She felt the mattress lowering as under the weight of a body sitting down on the edge. The bed shook with friendly laughter: Leslie on the edge of Ilka’s bed laughing at her. Ilka went on sleeping.
“Did you find your address book?” Maggie called to ask her mother.
“No,” said Ilka. “I don’t know anybody’s address. Maggie, oh, I don’t even know where Bethy is.” Ilka wept. She wept and wept.
© 2007 by Lore Groszmann Segal
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
“An Absence of Cousins,” “At Whom the Dog Barks,” “Fatal Wish,” “Leslie’s Shoes” (published under the title “William’s Shoes”), “Money, Fame, and Beautiful Women,” “Reverse Bug,” and “The Talk in Eliza’s Kitchen” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2007 Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Segal, Lore Groszmann.
Shakespeare’s kitchen : stories / Lore Segal.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-595-58583-7
I. Title.
PS3569.E425S47 2007
813’.54—dc22
2006030107
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