“What do you mean?”
He looked at me in genuine surprise. “There’s no contradiction between writing a good book and writing a profitable one. Isn’t that one of the reasons why this country is the envy of the world—the fact that excellence is rewarded?”
“Do you believe your book will be a bestseller?”
Ralph didn’t even smile. “With all my heart.”
How like his father he looked at that moment!
That evening Ed Herlands rolled up to the house in his fine convertible, escorting a frightened showgirl with long legs and a nervous smile. Rita had also invited her brother, who was at the time an Army captain stationed at Fort Niagara for the duration, and his wife. We were a very mixed company.
Rita’s brother Fred was a sandy-haired small-town lawyer with a pompous drawl and a way of uttering commonplace statements as though they were new and important. He seemed very pleased with his uniform. His wife was a clubwoman with fluttering fingers and a harassed air who regarded Rita and Ralph as her social equals and me as her superior, apparently simply because I was a New Yorker associated with “the arts.” Her deferential manner did not extend to Ed Herlands, despite his obvious wealth, and certainly not to his girl friend, who sat in a corner of the couch with her wonderful legs tightly crossed, chain smoking and trying desperately to look as though she was used to spending her evenings chatting about T. S. Eliot.
Ed was determined to shock the yokels. Obviously Captain Fred Conway and his wife had never mixed with showgirls, and were making an earnest effort to regard Ellie as a girl with a “different” and “interesting” occupation, despite Ed’s chuckling assurances that she was just someone whom he was fortunate (or wealthy) enough to be sleeping with. “Ellie and I were having breakfast the other day,” he said genially, “and we got involved in a heated discussion—even before we’d brushed our teeth—on the relation of homosexuality to artistic creation.” Then he looked around to observe the effect of his statement.
Fred sat with his freckled fingers linked across his officer’s jacket, his eyes blinking rapidly and expressionlessly, as if he were listening to a client outlining a legal problem; his wife looked as though she wished with all her heart that she were back home in Fredonia; and Ellie herself, breathing deeply, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps to call attention to her excellent bosom, smiled defiantly, waiting for us to challenge this preposterous account of a conversation that could never have taken place.
But Rita was grinning happily, why I couldn’t tell; it might have been that she was not even listening, but was only smiling at the pleasure of relaxing after a long day. Ralph however was nibbling angrily and nervously at his stiff mustache.
“Where’s your friend Bagby?” I said to Ed. “I’d half expected to see him tonight.”
“He’s in New York, studying the dance on a Herlands fellowship.”
“Oh?”
“Nothing princely, you understand. But whenever he gets hungry, he manages to let me know, and I send on a check. If you can’t accomplish anything yourself, it’s nice to know that you can do it vicariously.”
Mrs. Conway was delighted that the conversation was being diverted into safer channels. “That’s wonderful of you. If only more people of means—”
“It’s not wonderful at all. I take it off my taxes. Besides, it gives me a feeling of power.” He laughed soundlessly. “I’ve made the same offer to Ralph, but he’s afraid.”
“Afraid?” Fred cocked his head with judicial caution, scenting some new buffoonery on Ed’s part.
“I told him to go off someplace where he wouldn’t be bothered by the kids, where he could write all day and talk all night—for a year, or longer if he needed… and I would foot the bills. But as you see he’s never taken me up on it.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ellie’s bust rising and falling, rising and falling. Ralph sat with his lips tightly pressed together.
“But you could hardly expect—” Fred’s wife began indignantly.
“That he’d leave his family? Not if he were an ordinary ungifted person like me—or like your husband… But don’t we always have other expectations of artistic people?”
Rita said sharply, “Ed, I think—” but he cut in swiftly:
“I’ll tell you why he turns me down. He’s afraid that if I gave him his real chance he’d write a couple tons of junk, or even worse that he wouldn’t write at all without the spur of a lousy job and the dream of getting loose from it by making a million bucks.
“But we mustn’t forget that Ralph is a very moral man. And if he failed to produce he figured he’d have to come back with his tail between his legs and spend the rest of his life working, like a character out of Balzac or de Maupassant, to pay me back the money I’d given him, and that I wouldn’t particularly want anyway, except for his peculiar standards of rectitude.”
Ralph stood up. “Are you all through?”
“Hell, no. Now I’ve got a good idea for a novel myself, and I suspect that I could really get it done and make a name for myself if I was broke and had your incentive to get at it. By the way, am I monopolizing the conversation?”
Rita said: “Tell us about your novel—I hope it’s funny.”
“It’s deadly serious. My hero is a man who is obsessed by one strange fear, which forces him to change his entire pattern of life.”
“Oh, that sounds fascinating.” Mrs. Conway looked around hopefully, as if she still expected that somehow the evening could be salvaged.
“My hero has heart trouble. He has to avoid overeating and overexertion. He’s grown terrified that one day he’ll strain too hard—he also suffers from constipation—and will have a heart attack in the bathroom. This fear of dying at stool is particularly repugnant to him because he is a sensitive man. He has visions, nightmares, of himself dead in an ignominious position, his trousers crumpled around his ankles, his suspenders dangling on the floor, his face pressed against his bare hairy knees, and his thin hair hanging forward so that his bald spot, usually decently concealed, is immediately apparent to the firemen who break open the door and discover his lifeless body. Sometimes he is horrified by the thought that his body will remain undiscovered for many hours, and will stiffen in its ridiculous and ungainly position. He visualizes burly policemen with faces as red as his is purple, trying to straighten out his corpse and draw his trousers up over his flanks. The irony of it is that this fastidious man must go to the most degrading lengths in order to avoid the necessity of evacuating alone. He searches out bathrooms without locks, and uses those primitive arrangements where men relieve themselves publicly in long rows, military style. He—”
“That’s enough, Ed.”
“More than enough. A compulsive writer could make a powerful thing out of it, couldn’t he? Subtly bringing out the symbolism of the man who wants to create alone but can’t take a chance.” He winked at Ellie, who was nervously rearranging her back hair with arms upraised so that her taut bust, covered with sequins, seemed to blink back at him. “But I enjoy myself so much that I’ve never gotten past the first chapter.”
“Don’t play dumb,” Ralph snapped. “You’re determined to make me look a fool, with this coarse and vulgar—”
“If you’re going to be stuffy, old man, I’ll withdraw my standing offer of a Herlands fellowship.”
“I’d never take a dime from you for a share in my stock. When it comes, my success is going to be my own.”
Ralph’s brother-in-law nodded approvingly. With his professional smile turned on, he looked like a death’s-head. “Your book will be all the better for that attitude.”
“I doubt if it will satisfy either you or me,” Ed put in blandly. “Ralph operates under the illusion that he can produce a real work of art and make a fortune with it. Mark Twain had reason to believe in himself as a businessman-artist, in his time a Buffalo boy could still make his pile with his pen. But not any more, Ralphie, not any more.”
Rita
put her hand to her mouth and turned blindly away, fumbling for a candy dish. At that moment I hated Ed with all my heart.
“I think Ralph is entitled to a hobby without being teased about it, don’t you?” Fred’s wife asked me, as if I could become her ally in averting disaster.
But Ralph turned on her bitterly. “I have no hobbies. I despise people with hobbies. Someday you’ll brag that you’re my relative.”
The three of us were a little constrained at the end of the evening, after Fred and his wife had left, coldly declining Ed’s offer of a lift. Ed stayed on long enough to offer to fix me up with Ellie’s younger sister (I declined not without regret) and to apologize perfunctorily to Rita.
“He was a monster tonight,” she said tiredly, as she stood at the sink in her stocking feet, washing the cake dishes.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Ralph replied slowly. “It wasn’t an unusual performance. I happened to be handy, so he used me. I don’t really care. What the hell, the proof will be in the eating.”
Ralph’s pudding wasn’t ready when I met him next, several years later, but the circumstances of our meeting were so unusual that I didn’t think much about his book at first. I was totally unprepared to see him advancing towards me in the bar of the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, dressed in the uniform of a Naval lieutenant, and without his mustache.
“Great to see you, Harry! Got time for a drink?”
“You seem less surprised to see me than I am to see you.”
“I read about the orchestra in the paper.” He took off his white officer’s hat, and I saw that his stiff shock of black hair had been cropped quite short. He looked ten years younger. “I’d planned to look you up tonight. Didn’t you know I was in the Navy? Didn’t Rita write you?”
“I’ve had only one postal from her in the last year.”
“I expect she wasn’t too anxious to tell you about it. That was the biggest row we’ve ever had, when she learned that I’d applied for a commission. She’d gotten to like the kind of life we were leading, and she couldn’t bear to have anything disrupt it, even though it was inevitable. Probably she’d have been just as upset if I’d allowed myself to be drafted.”
“I doubt that.”
Ralph turned red. “You’re right, of course. What bothered her most was the idea that I was willing, even anxious, to get away. The night I left for indoctrination school—” he hesitated, toying with his glass of beer, “—Rita accused me of deliberately setting out to commit suicide, the way children fantasy themselves dead in their coffins, surrounded by weeping and repentant parents.”
“She was overwrought.”
“Of course.”
“But you look happier now than in years.”
“I am. And I think Rita is too. She had visions of me being torpedoed, spurlos versenkt, or blown to pieces by a Kamikaze. But here I am safe and sound in San Francisco, presumably doing naval research because I’m a hydraulic engineer, and with leisure to read and meet people for the first time in my life. I suspect Rita’s enjoying a vacation from the old routine herself.”
“Do you still get up in the middle of the night?”
Ralph smiled shyly. “Only writing I can do is letters to Rita. There’ll be time for the book when I get back.” He stood up and glanced at his watch. “Rita’s expecting a long-distance call from me in a few minutes. Would you like to say hello?”
“I’d love to.”
I stood next to the phone booth and watched Ralph drumming his fingers while he waited for the connection. I thought of his father, whom he never mentioned any more, and as I looked at Ralph I observed for the first time that two vertical furrows were grooving into his cheeks, just like the old man’s. He looked young in his uniform, but he was not really young.
Suddenly he stuck his head out of the door and said, apropos of nothing at all, “You must know what it means to get some recognition for your work. If only the war was over and I could finish, I know in my bones that people like—” he looked into the telephone as though he could not meet my eyes, “—well, like Edmund Wilson, would take me seriously. If they didn’t, I don’t think I could go on living.” His eyes were burning. “But right now I’m concentrating on finding out what the man in the street wants. I want to do a new final draft that will insure me a really big audience. That’s why I’ve been reading a lot of good histories and talking to all kinds of people.”
Then he laughed and said, “You must think I’m an egomaniac. What about you? You don’t have a wife or anything yet, do you?”
“I was engaged for a while to an OPA economist, but she got sick of waiting for me to make up my mind, so she joined the Waves.”
Ralph disconcerted me by laughing out loud. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you talk to Rita first? We’ll surprise her. Go on, go ahead.” He stepped out and extended the earphone to me.
I stood in the little metal chamber, listening to the sharp inhuman voices of switchboard girls all over the country. Yes Des Moines, The exchange is Linden, L as in Love, and suddenly I did not want to speak to Rita at all, I wanted to be quit of the Everetts and their crumbling dream world.
But suddenly Rita’s voice, clear and yet infinitely small, as though she were speaking from another world, filled me with such anguished nostalgia that I could not bring myself to look through the glass door as I listened. She was frightened and lonely, and she insisted that with Ralph gone, there was no one in Buffalo to talk to. That had been Ralph’s old complaint. I clung to the telephone and I wondered. Why must there be someone to talk to? Does it really mean someone to listen, like the audiences I have had all my adult life—so that I have never deeply felt the need of a listener—or does it imply that the listener will answer, that he will say not the things that are better left unsaid, like Ed Herlands, but the things that one needs desperately to hear?
Ralph’s smile had faded to a shadow by the time he replaced me in the phone booth, for I had managed to get Rita to say goodbye only by promising to come to Buffalo at the earliest opportunity.
Actually I had no such opportunity until after the Japanese had quit and Ralph had returned from the West Coast. When I did get to Buffalo it seemed to me that Rita must have been overwrought during that feverish telephone conversation, for the Everetts’ lives appeared hardly to have been affected by the war. Rita and the older girls had been thrilled by their one visit to the West Coast, and Ralph himself said to me briefly, after he had greeted me at the station and helped me into his car, “Well, I had a very pleasant vacation too—” (This in reply to my remark about a trip to Nova Scotia I had just taken with my brother and his family) “—but it’s over now, and I’m satisfied. If the war had lasted much longer, I would have had trouble getting back my work habits.”
He had gotten back his mustache too. It was peppered with grey, and I wondered why he felt that he needed it, but that was the kind of question you could never ask of Ralph even if you put it as a joke. Almost as soon as we had reached his home, Ralph excused himself and headed back for the toolhouse, saying over his shoulder, “See you at the supper table.”
The girls greeted me with shrieks of delight and led me to the kitchen, where Rita stood with her head bent forward over a mixing bowl, her blonde hair hanging full across her face. When she looked up her eyes were brimming with tears: I was startled and frightened, and for one instant I felt like bolting.
But then she laughed, and as she brushed the back of her hand across her face I saw that the tears had been caused by onions which she was slicing into a bowl of chopped meat. I was overcome with such enormous relief that I stepped forward and kissed her damp cheek.
“Are we going to play some duets while I’m here?” I asked.
“Don’t tease me. If it wasn’t for our record collection, which is mostly albums you’ve brought us, there wouldn’t be any music in my life at all—except for the girls.”
“Are you happy?”
“I’m busy. Ralph has been writi
ng ten hours a day, trying to finish before his terminal leave runs out. I take his lunch out to the toolhouse so he won’t break his train of thought.”
“And now you’re satisfied. I was never really sure.”
Rita’s hand came down on the kitchen table so sharply that the silverware jumped in the air and fell with a clatter. “Don’t you see, Harry? He’s almost finished. Suppose it’s a failure? What will we do?”
“What you’ve been doing for ten years. It depends on what you mean by failure, doesn’t it?”
“For ten years Ralph has been living for the day when the critics will cheer him. He talks about the money and independence, but it’s recognition he’s after. Suppose he doesn’t get it? Do you think he’ll be able to say, Better luck next time? Do you?” Her voice rose dangerously. “Do you?”
“His book might sell moderately well and get some nice reviews, enough to make Ralph feel that he had made a good start.”
“A start?” she laughed scornfully. “And then what—back to the Water Department and the toolhouse? We’re not kids any more, Harry, neither of us … I hate melodrama, don’t you? Would you do me a favor—tell Ralph it’s time to knock off? You can go right out the kitchen door.”
So I followed the little trampled path that Ralph had made in the grass in his years of crossing back and forth; when I reached the sagging frame toolhouse I hesitated, still uncertain whether I should intrude. Finally I raised my fist and pounded on the iron-barred old door.
But Ralph’s voice said “Yup,” and I entered his headquarters. The walls of his spotless workroom were whitewashed and covered with old maps of the Niagara Frontier. Ralph was seated at a roll-top desk with his shirt sleeves turned back halfway to his elbows. He got up when he saw me. “You’ve never been in here before, have you? Let me show you my stuff.”
“Rita suggested that it’s time to knock off. I didn’t want to intrude.”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 21
