We walked to l’Hôtel des Grands Hommes in the rain, in our trenchcoats, my Kodak dangling from my hand, and he said, looking at the tattered building, “The day Jerry and I went to our first class, the landlady took one look at us and muttered, ’Il n’y a plus des grands hommes.’” I smiled—I knew better—and positioned him against a wall and took a picture of him lighting a cigarette in the rain. His eyes are toward the camera, his hands cup the flame, his trenchcoat sags with water.
Sometimes, when I am with women of my age and, I suppose, my kind, we reminisce about the images that stamped us, we claim, for life. They are all French.
“Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis. Remember? My God, that face! They talk about Garbo’s face. But not in a league with Barrault’s.”
“Gérard Philippe in Le Diable au Corps. When he leaned his head against Micheline Presle’s stomach. Do you know I have never loved anyone like I loved Gérard Philippe?”
“That picture of Camus lighting a cigarette. Not bad.”
I nod, smiling, at that last. I know that photograph. Only I replace Camus’s head with my husband’s.
We went to Ireland, too. Once, long before he knew he was ill, my father had said, “Ah, Mary Lee. I want to walk on Stephen’s Green before I die.” So now, I told my husband, I have to do it for him. Loving me, always treating me like a student, just beginning to treat me like a patient, B. agreed.
We walked on Stephen’s Green and saw the Book of Kells and shopped for linen placemats, and one night we called on a friend of B.’s, an English professor from Berkeley who was living in a rundown Dublin hotel while he worked on a Yeats variorum. B. had known Tom at Wesleyan, where he taught for a year or so after refusing to sign California’s loyalty oath. So had another of B.’s English professors, as had one of mine, and since all three were livelier than most of our respective college’s English faculty, we found them yet another reason to feel superior to the West Coast. Such a stupid place, to force its best to flee eastward!
Because Tom was older than we, and B.’s former teacher besides, we treated him with a certain deference. He lectured; we listened and sipped Irish whiskey out of tooth glasses.
Tom knew Yeats’s daughter and his widow, the spirit-writer, and one day they had invited him to dinner. He asked, “May I follow an old California custom and bring the wine?” and Mrs. Yeats said, “Do you think the unicorn will mind?”
“And I thought to myself,” he said, laughing and rocking on his long crane’s legs, “‘My God, this is it. I’m at the source. It was the unicorn that guided her hand, and that in turn guided Yeats!’ And then I found out the Unicorn was the name of the restaurant she was taking me to!”
I looked around the room, at the faded ceiling decorations, which I liked to think were by Angelica Kauffmann but probably weren’t, and at the pile of manuscripts on his desk. They were Yeats’s, in small crabbed writing, and mine for the touching. I looked around at the other guests, young men mostly, in raincoats, half of whom seemed to be named Padraic. The dim room, the Irish cast: they could have shot The Informer in that room.
There was a lot of backtalk and backbiting and a lot of high-flying hopes tempered with cynicism, and an unspoken but audible conviction that nobody and nothing in that room would ever get off the ground. (One man, a poet and anthologist, did, and I see his name sometimes, but flying low.) That evening was one of a thousand like it, I suppose, for most of the people in that room. But not for me. For me, it was like being at the heart of Ireland—the bitter heart, my father would have said.
We had read about a spa named Lisdoonvarna and went there, to find a small town, gray and ugly and smelling of peat like most Irish towns. When we saw its shabby old hotel we laughed, and when we asked a little girl standing in the doorway if that candy store on the corner sold newspapers, she said, “By God they do!” and again we laughed. We laughed some more when we saw the swaybacked mattress and the net curtains and the chipped bureau, but I stopped laughing when my husband led me to the bed.
I did what I was supposed to do. I always did, watching while the softness in B.’s face slid into rock and then out again into near-tears.
“Why, Mary Lee?” he asked. “What’s wrong with me?”
“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s me. I can’t get out.”
There was another hotel, in the countryside, a nineteenth-century version of a medieval castle that looked like a cardboard cutout pasted against Ireland’s forever clouding and unclouding sky. Whether it was actually run by nuns or just had an order living on the grounds we never knew, but we would pass a clump of them every morning—red-faced, hearty, plopping through the mud in big rubber boots. “Chaucerian!” we would say, delighted.
Meals were taken in a dismal, drafty, high-ceilinged hall that stank of disinfectant and were served by shy young girls with soft voices and thick, wind-reddened legs. We slept in a cottage down the road that had one room, so small that the double bed nearly filled it, as crowded with holy pictures and mass cards as a chapel at Lourdes. Fornicate in a room like that? Better Castel Gandolfo.
During the day we drove over treeless hills, past pewter-colored ponds and midge-tented bogs and tumbles of limestone while I read aloud from the guidebook about what battle was here, which queen buried there. It seemed that we were driving through an enormous boneyard, that Ireland had a subterranean scaffolding made of skeletons. And because there were no houses between us and the soil, no human barriers, I felt myself sliding into that soil, slithering past the bones.
We drove to Sligo, to a graveyard on the outskirts of town. Chickens were pecking their way through the rough grass and the dried wreaths, and the stones all bore inscriptions like “Here lies” and “Sacred to the memory of.” Except for one. That one stood tall at the head of a long, sunken slab and read, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.” My husband photographed me standing beside Yeats’s grave, wearing an odd belted coat we called my Gertrude Stein coat and a silent face. Not surprising. I am talking to my father. I am saying, “Look at me, Papa. Look where I am.”
2
ONCE B. SAID that if I had not married him, I would have spent my life alone in a room cluttered with old I. Miller boxes (shoes were my only extravagance) stuffed with dollar bills. I believed him. I think I was dependent from the beginning, but maybe I was being drained of will. Certainly I was being drained of blood. My menstrual periods had turned into hemorrhages, and coming home at night, I would have to sit and catch my breath on the second flight of stairs before going into our apartment. But if I was Mina Murray, it was because I wanted to be.
No, this discussion is too fanciful, the comparison too arty. Besides, the subject is academic now, serving only as an amusement on evenings when I cannot sleep and conduct dialogues with this woman I used to be but have never understood. All I am sure of is that by the time I went to work for Vogue, my husband was to me what a piling is to a barnacle and I, dangerously anemic, weighed 103. “You’re so thin,” the stubby little woman who was my boss would snap, slapping my waist with a flat palm. She was jealous, I think.
I was at Vogue because one April evening while I was bent over the begonias in the windowboxes Jerry had made us, which I cultivated as assiduously as if they were gardens, B. came home with some news. By now he was in the trade department of a big publishing house and in on all the gossip. The literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar had told him that Vogue was looking for a feature writer. Maybe I should apply for the job.
My rich great-aunt, who (like others of her ilk) dressed mostly in bouclé suits slung with dead foxes, scoured Vogue every month to see what “they”—an indefinable entity to whom she and my mother paid constant obeisance—were wearing. “Why don’t you enter that contest, that Prix de Paris?” she had said. Uninterested but obliging, I entered the competition, which was for college seniors and involved questions like “What is style?” Having done the bare minimum on the assignments, I was startled when I
was named a runner-up. My God, I thought when I received the congratulatory letter, I might have won this thing.
Working for Vogue, like working for Mademoiselle, would be like eating marshmallows all the time. Even so, writing “Jerry Lewis, thin, dark, and crazy-nuts funny” struck me as a big step up from writing “Plum-perfect silk taffeta, pleated to within an inch of its life.”
B. unearthed tear sheets of my only example of nonfashion copy—eight hundred or so words about four female novelists—and dictated the letter with which I sent them to Condé Nast’s personnel director, a former gym teacher with the manner, and command, of a mother superior. A few weeks later I found myself sitting in Vogue’s enormous waiting room, which was furnished with the kind of spindly chairs and tables I knew from Miss Dutton’s Tearoom in Providence, Rhode Island, and painted eau de Nile and silver. “Found myself” because, strictly speaking, I had not really arrived there under my own steam.
Would that I had had a sense of the ridiculous! Would that I had not been as sober as an owl, as judgmental as Cotton Mather! I might have dined out on life in Vogue’s feature department. Instead I stayed in to cry.
What a cast! Were the women who worked on fashion magazines like Vogue in the late fifties crazier than the ones who work on them today? (Mademoiselle, but for its fashion editors, attracted more bookish types, the kind who later staffed publishing houses.) Or is it that I, small-town and shy, saw anyone whose sophistication exceeded mine as exotic? I have given the matter much thought, another of my dialogues for sleepless nights, and have decided on the former. The late fifties at Vogue, and presumably Bazaar, represented the madwoman’s last hurrah.
My researcher—the title given to secretaries at the magazine so they would not realize they were secretaries—was small, pretty, eager, and married to a homosexual. She had met him in Paris during her (and his) junior year abroad, and with its being Paris and her having read a lot and him wanting to write a lot, she confused him with André Gide and was wed.
They lived on the Upper West Side, next door to the fiction editor of Esquire, into whose apartment they could peer from their bedroom window. The fiction editor, who didn’t know of their presence and indeed never met them, worked nights at his kitchen table under their constant surveillance. Aided by binoculars, they would try to spot the moment when his eyes fell on one of the husband’s manuscripts and thereby study his facial reactions.
Their night watches struck me as peculiar, as did her happy smile when she told me she was leaving him of whom she spoke so lovingly, so I wasn’t surprised when her parents swept into New York and had her committed to a sanatorium. She was a not atypical employee.
I should add that on the second day I worked at Vogue, I was told never to use her as a researcher, since she was unreliable. Since good typing was beyond her as well, I soon decided that her real role, apart from bringing in the tea and cookies that arrived on our desks every day at four, was to be one of the cloud of butterflies hired by the personnel department to decorate the place and disguise the fact that the rest of the employees were worker bees or praying mantises.
The second researcher was a butterfly, too, a tall dim girl from Bernards ville, New Jersey, who spent every weekend in Maine with her fiancés family, flown there by the family plane. Once, grumbling slightly about having lost a brooch at a wedding reception, she brought me the insurance form so I could check her spelling and I saw that the pin was valued at $3,000, or more than half her salary. Again, a not atypical employee.
She had literary ambitions and wrote occasional captions, which, like all our captions, were thick with adjectives and strong verbs and adhered to the rule of three: each subject got three modifiers. A movie actress might be “beautiful, brainy, and unexpectedly bizarre”; a movie actor, “russet-haired, impish, and crinkle-grinned.” Eighteenth-century artists were often called upon. All fair-haired women looked like Greuzes to us; and Brigitte Bardot was compared to Boucher’s Mademoiselle O’Murphy. A small woman was invariably a Tanagra figurine, and when in doubt we relied on “extraordinary.”
The woman with whom I shared an office—a perfect cube with two old desks, a cracked ceiling, peeling paint, and a travel poster depending from one strip of Scotch tape—was a rarity, a combination butterfly and worker bee. Her hair bubbled blond and her eyes flashed blue and she spoke with an international accent, crisp and faintly British.
Her former husband, the author of “the definitive book on the Argentine pampas,” she said, had run through all her money, and she was living in a small apartment on Park Avenue. She slept there, dressed there, received her dinner dates there, but never saw the inside of the kitchen unless she was pouring herself a morning glass of orange juice. No embassy gave a dinner party without her, since she spoke four or five languages and could be depended upon to beguile all visiting foreigners. She had been the girlfriend of a famous movie star and a close friend of a famous conductor and, desperate to remarry, would one day land a French diplomat—”It was a coup de foudre, Mary, an absolute coup de foudre” —whose previous marriages she dismissed by saying, ”The first was when he was very young, so we’ll overlook that, and the second was to a Pole, which doesn’t count because nobody can stay married to a Pole.”
Under the bubbles, however, was a hard head and, I found, surprised because she prattled of her Virginia birth in such a way as to make one think she was every Byrd, Lee, and Carter rolled into one, a lapsed Catholicism of the Irish variety. Whenever one or the other of us was called to the mat by our editor, we exchanged signs of the cross and laugh-punctuated Hail Marys.
Down the hall worked Margaret Case, the society editor, though she was never known by so definitive and essentially déclassé a title. A friend to the rich, a brute to her researchers, she was not unkind to me. When I had to write about Newport, she hovered over the phone while I called the wife of the man who had revived the old Newport Casino to ask about the exact color of the new shingles, and, satisfied that I had not shamed Vogue with my gaucherie, proceeded to put a little trust (not much) in my intelligence. When she finished the draft of a letter to the princesse de Rethy, the king of Belgium’s consort, for instance, she brought it to me for editing, although I was, still am, the last person to ask about protocol and royalty. When she had to make phone calls about a sad, poor sister, I think it was, she made them from my office, trusting that I would not talk.
When I wrote of somebody’s “magnificent Venetian palazzo,” she told me to strike “magnificent.” “I’ve seen better,” she growled. And when (or so I was told) she talked the archbishop of Canterbury into being photographed by Penn or somebody like Penn, she ended the telephone conversation with a peremptory “And wear your robes!” One month she went to Greece, and I, excited at the prospect of anyone’s going to Greece, asked her if she had been there before. “Only on the Onassis yacht,” she said.
Miss Case had no jewelry, no jewelry that counted anyway, and whenever I went into her office she was phoning someone called “Darling Vava” and telling him that Mrs. Luce said she could borrow her sapphires for that evening and would he please get them out and she’d send her researcher for them. There was something noble about her, I thought, struggling into a girdle and an evening gown night after night and smearing orange lipstick across her thin, impatient mouth.
A long time later, after she had forgotten my name and where she had known me, we shared an elevator. She remembered my face and said, “Tell me. I just got a letter from a friend’s daughter who wants to work for a magazine. Tell me. Was typing a great help to you in your career?” “Yes, it was,” I said, and we never spoke again, although I often saw her hailing cabs. When she killed herself, jumping fourteen stories naked under the plaid raincoat that was her all-weather uniform, I was truly sorry, because she had been nice to me, knowing that I knew she was an outsider, never mind the rich friends, and liked her anyway.
Now we come to my editor, Allene Talmey, Allene who was as short and firmly pa
cked as a Boston bull and had a Boston bull’s bright brown eyes. She never showed up before eleven in the morning and never left before seven at night, and she worked out of a small, plain office with a Tamayo of a watermelon on one wall. Her desk and desk chair were mounted on a thick pad, presumably to save the rug. But the pad also served to raise her above whomever she was talking to, which always struck me as the point.
On my first day at Vogue, she dumped on my desk a pile of research, all of it in French, which was to help me in my first assignment: deep captions, as we called them, for some Penn photographs of elderly French notables. No one, certainly not she, had ever asked me if I read French. It was an assumption, as taken for granted there as one’s washing one’s hands before leaving the ladies’ room. It was also, less innocently, a way of separating the sheep from the goats.
I do read French, so I passed the test. The test I could not pass was lining up the requisite modifiers, at least one of which had to be unexpected, tap-dancing through the middle and coming up with a smash finish. When I would go to Allene for help, she would tell me that what I had done was wrong, all wrong, but she would never say or show me why. I would study the caption and, not having been given an exit from my sentences and unable to find one on my own, would grow as dizzy and frantic as a rat in a maze.
Where to go for research was another problem. One of the notables was a sculptor of whom I had never heard. When I asked Allene where I could get more information, she told me to go to the owner of the gallery that showed his work. But when the same problem arose with another artist (the notables were certainly that, but they were also obscure) and I suggested going to his dealer, her reply was “Don’t you know that’s the worst gallery in New York?” She said nothing further, so I returned to my desk, stared at the material, didn’t know who else to call, and felt the start of the paralysis that eventually swallowed me.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 8
