Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “I know, I know, please, I’ve read it.”

  “‘… youthful voice, with an almost boyish charm, emanates from a person no whit less charming. Mlle. Herma is distinguished above all for her versatility, her easy command of a by-no-means modest vocal range, for the grace, above all, of her rendition of the simple but haunting waltz Kiss Me Again. One is hard pressed to say …”’

  “Don’t bother, I know it by heart.”

  “‘ … hard pressed to say whether it is the mastery of Herbert himself or the verve and flair, the innocence, of this youthful nightingale …”’

  “So come to the point. Vat is it you vant?”

  “Two hundred a week is ridiculous.”

  “She is in the repertory. That is the vages agreed on.”

  “Yes, but that was before she brought gold raining down on the theater.”

  “Some silver dollars, perhaps,” muttered Speidermann. “No gold.”

  “Three hundred.”

  “Oh my. You are out of your head, young man. She has a contract. Two hundred.”

  “She might get sick. Sopranos often do.”

  “Vat are you saying?”

  “If she were unhappy, she might get sick. A sore throat or something. I’ve seen it happen with sopranos more than once.”

  “A sort throat?” Speidermann wrung his hands. “Two fifty.” “Two seventy-five.” Speidermann sighed.

  5.

  Late night in the city. The streets were silent, rats scuttled among the garbage cans, a slice of moon hung over Twin Peaks. In the suite of connecting rooms at the Larkin, with separate entrances but connecting bath, one slept. But which one?

  Fred usually slept fitfully and had dreams, and had to get up frequently in the middle of the night to relieve himself. He was a restless sleeper and made a wreck of the bedclothes. Herma on the other hand slept like a baby. So after he discovered this, he made a habit of converting himself into Herma every night before going to sleep. Sometimes he forgot this, and had to get up in the middle of the night to do it. It was a queer business on the whole. Fred hardly knew what to make of it himself. Through consulting the encyclopedia at the public library under a certain heading, he found out a number of more or less gratuitous pieces of information—for instance that the ancient seer Tiresias, having surprised some goddess at her bath, was punished by the gods by being converted into a woman. Later the gods relented and changed him back. For this he was supposed to be particularly wise. The myth didn’t say why; perhaps because, having been both man and woman, he knew the secrets of both. After Tiresias the article ended and the encyclopedia went on to other subjects: Hermeneutics, Hermetic, Hermes, Hermits, and Herma.

  Bah, Fred thought. Why so much bother about a piece of tissue that popped back and forth from concave to convex every so often? Still, in the whole matter he detected hints of a fundamental meaning which eluded him, that sort of profound but vague significance we seem to perceive now and then in the confusion of the world around us. There was one question in particular that puzzled. How much did Herma know of Fred, and vice versa? He pondered: awake, does one know what one is asleep? Yes, in a way. And asleep, does one know what one is awake? Yes, but only dimly. Asleep, one thinks: I would like to be awake, so that this particular nightmare would be over. And awake: I would like to be asleep, where perhaps in a dream I might meet that person again. Of course, in the case of Herma and Fred, you were awake in both cases. Yet the sensation was the same as that in a dream, or like it.

  Herma slept like a baby, without dreams. And Fred when he was awake, to tell the truth, didn’t spend very much time pondering over these abstract and metaphysical matters. He was too busy with other things. Not that managing Herma’s affairs took much of his time. But he had his own concerns—after all, he had his own life to live—he couldn’t spend it haggling with Speidermann over twenty-five dollars. Here he was, by some arrangement of destiny, living in this vital and bustling city which had the best climate in the world, as everyone kept saying. All life was open to him, in its myriad attractions and fascinations. His mornings were free. He spent them, for the most part, exploring the city on foot, with occasional recourse to cabs or to the Powell Street cable car. Everything was intoxicating—the climate, the tall buildings, the whole energetic and stimulating busy quality of the life about him. And the women—it was true they were outnumbered by men, but there were still a good many of them out on Market Street at ten o’clock in the morning, in fashionable clothes and carrying with them a faint scent of perfume as they passed. The sight of some pretty girl or other in the street was enough to make his heart twang like a harp string. And they were available! For, in at least a part of his mind, Fred always believed in the possibility that any woman might unexpectedly offer herself to him, resulting in a brief but intensely poignant episode, lasting only a quarter of an hour perhaps but never after forgotten. No obligations and no regrets. It would be beautiful. It would be exquisite. It would be poetry.

  For Herma, this was only another instance of colossal male egotism. Every one of them, no matter how ugly or aged, imagined himself in a part of his mind to be irresistible to all women. Each one thought that there was something there in himself—some fierce and virile splendor, partly hidden—but some day the most dazzling beauty of all would detect it and hold out her arms saying “Come.” The vain pigs! In the end they were the same, all of them—a lot of sweaty meat with a red prong attached to it. And they imagined that every Lillian Russell, every stage or opera star, every anyone at all, wished for nothing better than to have this thing inserted into her immediately. But a girl who would give herself in such a way was—a shameless thing. If she would do it for one, she would do it for all. That was what they ought to remember.

  That wasn’t it at all, Fred knew. One didn’t imagine one’s self irresistible, even to a beggar woman. It was simply that one always believed, or imagined in a kind of reverie, that such a thing might or could happen—not on account of one’s own qualities, even though one was confident of them—but through a kind of incredible luck, a gift, unexplained and gratis, in the way that an unpredictable God may offer Grace to even the most hopeless sinner. And if it happened! It couldn’t happen, one knew in one’s rational moments. Yet it might. Such things have been known. And so one had to look carefully at all attractive women, to see if perhaps this one …

  The crude brutes! For them, Herma thought, all women were just walking receptacles. Nothing else, and always. The trouble with being attractive to men, she thought, was that you couldn’t turn it off and on. At times it was delightful. But at other times, when you were thinking about something else, or wanted to do something else, it was just a nuisance. But that was all they wanted from you, if you were just a little bit pretty. It was a perplex. On the one hand a pretty woman wanted to be pretty, and on the other hand—if she were intelligent at all—she didn’t want to be only an object. And it really got rather boring being followed around by people who were lustful toward her, whatever else they might pretend to be interested in, or whatever else they might be talking about. When there were so many other interesting things in the world that you could do. Of course, the exception was Fred. He wasn’t interested in her in that way. And nevertheless, he annoyed her more than all the others. His smug notes on the mirror! His failure to wash his hands after—you know what. And the way he spent money, which she earned. In short, Herma wished to be regarded as more than a kind of human Victrola and endless source of dollars, which was what Fred regarded her as.

  Oh grand, Fred thought. Now that we are on the subject of vanity—there was that famous voice of hers. As her manager he was obliged to vaunt it. The clear vibrancy and force, the mastery of the true artist, and so on. But in his heart (even though he was not, he admitted, a musician) he knew she didn’t really have a great voice. She had a clever voice, a voice that was apt at mimicry. A range of three octaves, it was true. And she was quick. She was clever. Her musicianship was instinctive and une
rring. But a great voice? In any case, it wasn’t as though she made something. She was just born with it, as though she had six fingers. So there was nothing to be vain about.

  Fred, to tell the truth, did not have a very great respect for the vocal art. He thought: women like to talk, and the epitome of talking is singing—a loud, uninterruptible, very beautiful noise. Opera is a woman’s world. Every opera centers around the soprano. It is always the woman who is the star—even in Otello, where the whole story is about Otello and Iago, and Desdemona is a shrinking little thing who hardly sings for five minutes. But she is the soprano and it’s she who gets the bravas.

  The female is the Creature of the Mouth, Fred thought, and the male is the Creature of the Hand. She has her orifice, he has his tool. The point about a woman, whether she was singing or making love, was that the orifice came open and provided pleasure. Tra la la la, Mi chiamano Mimì. But with a man, the thing, whatever it was, the hand, the tool—was outside—you did things with it. You raised skyscrapers, flung railroads across the prairie, or built flying machines and lifted yourself into the air.

  Splendid, splendid, Herma thought. Also the Maxim gun and the cuckoo clock. Boys and their toys! The ability to utilize a screwdriver, in their minds, was a clear demonstration of sexual superiority. Thus their tendency to regard women too as machines—mechanical dolls that could be manipulated if you pushed the right buttons. Je m’en fiche de leurs machines! she told herself.

  And then there was the matter of languages, Fred went on, following the logical sequence of thoughts. Both he and she were skillful. But he had to think before he spoke. Herma did not—if in fact she was capable of thought at all, as this process was conceived by the opposite sex. If it had been necessary to think in order to learn languages, probably she wouldn’t have learned them. Instead she spoke like a parrot. He like a mathematician—in correct grammar, but haltingly, as though he were working out an equation. Yet he had a feeling for languages—he was interested in etymologies, fond of turns of grammar. Did she even know what an etymology was? She probably thought it had something to do with bugs.

  Take your prong and go out on Market Street, Herma thought. Only don’t catch another nastiness, the way you did at Cantamar. It was a very incompetent Deity, a male one no doubt, who had decreed that only through this folly could the human race reproduce itself and go on existing down the centuries. The beast with two backs! Fiercely she resented being the half that was underneath. And yet—and yet—with the right person—with Mr. Earl Koenig, or some other shy and gentle man who respected her—it could be beautiful. It could be exquisite. It could be poetry. The thing was, it had to come of itself. You couldn’t just roam up and down Market Street looking for it. It was magic. It was a piece of luck, a Grace, as though an unpredictable god …

  Which was just what Fred himself said, if she would only understand. But she would never listen.

  6.

  When there were no rehearsals, or other business at the theater like fittings, Herma had her afternoons free. She spent them, for the most part, exploring the city on foot, now and then taking a cab. But the city tucked into its hills was compact enough that you could get to almost any part of it with a half an hour’s walking. The city, only a half century old and still growing and flexing its muscles like an adolescent, was already various, myriad, and richly cosmopolitan. There were art galleries, bookstores, specialty shops offering fine imported foodstuffs, stores where you could buy anything from Persian carpets to English Spode china. In the City of Paris Department Store alone there was enough to occupy Herma for a month of afternoons. She wandered with a thoughtful expression through the displays of imported lingerie, glass cabinets of French scent, expensive soaps shaped like apples or pomegranates, hats with bird-of- paradise feathers, shoes made from crocodiles, and mother-of-pearl combs. She didn’t really care for buying things; she simply enjoyed drifting from room to room in the store, passing her fingers lightly now and then over a Spode cup or the feather of a hat.

  Yet it wasn’t really this part of the city—Market Street, the elegant shops on Montgomery, and Union Square—that interested Herma the most. The humbler parts of the city were full of unexpected discoveries. She liked to wander down back streets more or less at random—flâner was the French word. She didn’t know where she wanted to go until she saw where she was. And when she got there, there was always something interesting. An old man playing a violin. A suicide being carried out of a house. A cab man beating a horse, and a lady beating the cab man with her umbrella. On Eddy Street, not far from the hotel, she found a shop that sold nothing but dolls—Chinese dolls, Dresden dolls, English dolls, old American rag dolls, commedia dell’arte sets from Italy with Pulcinellas and Columbines. There was even a Liane de Pougy doll in white india rubber, with a costume that came off piece by piece to reveal, finally, two breasts the size of pearls and a tiny mons veneris. She wasn’t sure she cared for that. She was tempted, however, by a Chinese mandarin only six inches high, with a black satin gown and a mustache of genuine hair.

  Funny, I’ve never had a doll, she thought. She took up the mandarin and examined him, with an odd pleasure at holding him in her fingers. Tiny as he was, the doll was calm and dignified, and the miniature mustache was immaculately groomed. There was something complex and mysterious about him, perhaps lightly sinister—she thought of the word chinoiserie. After a moment she put him back on the shelf. No, she told the clerk, she didn’t care for anything. Yet it was the mandarin she coveted; if she had bought a doll at all it would have been him.

  And in fact, of all the quarters of the city, it was Chinatown itself—from Kearney to Stockton and from Bush to Columbus Avenue on the north—that drew her back again and again. She was content to spend whole hours prowling along Dupont Street, stopping to look in the shops of a hundred kinds, and all different from anything she had seen before—spice shops, stores where you could buy bizarre vegetables like mandrakes and taros, fish markets with fish that existed only in Chinese paintings. Portsmouth Square was full of old Chinese gentlemen who had nothing to do all day, apparently, but sit on benches and chat in the sunshine. There were almost no women; the preponderance of males was even more striking than it was in the rest of San Francisco. And the women you did see were—it was easy enough to see what they were. They wore tight-fitting gowns slit to the knees, and their faces were whitened with rice powder, the slender eyebrows traced and blackened. Their glossy black hair was drawn up at the back in elaborate chignons to show their pale and fragile necks. Some of them seemed hardly older than Herma. She exchanged a glance with one once—the girl looked back at her boldly, appraisingly. Flat-chested like herself, Herma thought. Suppose she spoke to her—it might be interesting. She might … find something out.

  But instead, after a moment, she turned haughtily away with her chin lifted and went on. Since there were no women in Chinatown, or only this kind, there were also no children. Only men—the old men in Portsmouth Square, the young men endlessly smoking and reading the wall posters, and the clerks in the stores, who looked sad and bored, as though they never hoped to earn enough money to go back to their native Kwangtung until they finally died and were shipped back in boxes—a steamer had left the other day for Canton with two hundred such crates in its hold, the Examiner said.

  Walking one day on Dupont Street, she strayed down a side street and found herself standing before an odd-looking building like a kind of pagoda, with stone lions guarding its entrance. After a short hesitation she went in. Beyond the vestibule was a large chamber full of the smell of incense and objects that seemed vaguely ritualistic. It was some time before her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Then she saw, across the room, a gentleman doing something mysterious in front of a statue of a plump man with crossed legs.

  He turned and stared at her in a bland and not unfriendly way.

  “Am I allowed to come in here?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Am I interrupting you?”
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br />   “No, I am just paying homage to my various ancestors. You see,” he explained, “we don’t have gods as you do. Instead we make our ancestors into gods. In that way, perhaps, we can have a little more influence with them.”

  “Does it work?”

  “I can’t say for sure. A good many of the good things of life seem to have come my way, for one reason or another.”

  At this point he smiled. She studied him, able to see him properly for the first time now that her eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He was not exactly a young man; perhaps forty. He wore a tunic like the old gentlemen in Portsmouth Square, except that his was an elegant pearl gray instead of black. Below this was a skirt, both garments evidently of silk. His face was smooth and unwrinkled; only the faint pattern of creases around his eyes revealed his age. His soft mustache, neatly trimmed and drooping at the ends, was exactly like that of the mandarin in the doll shop. His English was excellent. He spoke without a trace of accent, although with a slightly clipped flavor that was perhaps British in place of the American drawl. He had a perpetually amused expression about him, or perhaps ironic was the proper word; yet there was the faint quality of the melancholy about him as well.

  Since he continued to regard her, smiling, without feeling it necessary to say anything, she turned and began looking at the objects in the temple. Her attention was caught by the seated statue, which was perhaps not that of a man at all.

  “Is that a Bodhisattva?”

  “Not exactly, although you can call it that if you want. It’s a representation of Kuan-yin, who is called in his female form Tara. Such statues are Buddhistic. However we are not narrowly sectarian. Over here, as you see, various people have hung up tablets to their ancestors. This practice is Confucian, although you don’t have to be a Confucian to hang up a tablet. It is only necessary to have ancestors, and everyone has them. Perhaps you have some yourself. In which case, you are welcome to hang up a tablet.”