Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  “That’s so cute!” I said. Though I never used words like “cute.”

  I hated it, you said. It had this stupid smile on its face all the time, its hair was all knotted and mangy, one of its eyes was crazy.

  I started to get the feeling you were talking about me. “It’s just that I don’t have anywhere to go,” I said.

  Well what were you planning on doing? you asked. If you didn’t find Malinda. Or for that matter, if you found her?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  Well where were you planning to sleep? you said.

  “My car?” I said. I’d spent the previous night in the parking lot of a grocery store, and had barely slept. In the morning I’d woken up with my face stuck to the vinyl seat.

  Well this is absolutely pathetic, you said. You stood with your hands on your hips, the universal posture of disappointment. You’re just going to have to come home with me.

  Your grandparents’ was the biggest house in that small Arkansas town, a three-story Victorian with a turret on its west side, a wraparound front porch. Your grandfather, who had made his money in paper and envelopes, was the richest man in the county, and he had built for himself a house so big, and so like a museum, that it was referred to by name—“the Butler Place.” Your grandmother was always having boxes delivered to the house, large and small, from all kinds of foreign destinations, and people wondered what treasures lined the walls, the china cabinet, the bookshelves. They came to the door under the pretense of selling raffle tickets, of seeking charitable donations, of wanting petitions signed, of looking for work, and they stood craning their necks, wanting to see inside. But your grandmother allowed no one in except the handyman and the maid, a married black couple who lived on the outskirts of town.

  Mostly what your grandmother ordered were educational materials—books and music. She had been raised by what she referred to as “people of nobility”—many of her relatives had held positions of governance within the Confederacy—and though her family’s stature had fallen into decline, she was determined, through her marriage and offspring, to redeem it. Your mother, unknown to you and shrouded in mystery, had proved a failure, and was never mentioned apart from the passing reference to the shame she’d inflicted on the family. Now you were your grandmother’s only hope. She was obsessed with your proper upbringing, your education and advancement—it was her particular wish that you become a senator.

  Before you started grade school you could read and write, add and subtract. You could identify all of the world’s countries and their capitals. You could say Hello, Please, Thank you, and Farewell in ten different languages. By the time you were six your grandmother had already given you the social training of a diplomat. She kept a first edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette laid open on a wooden stand, and whenever you violated a rule she made you stand before the book and recite the relevant passage twenty-five times. When gentlemen are introduced to each other they always shake hands.

  Music was your grandmother’s one indulgence, the closest you were allowed to leisure. In the afternoons the two of you sat in your rocking chairs on the front porch, listening to records. She had records delivered to the house from shops all over the world, and by the time you were five you could name and recognize dozens of different composers. The summer before you entered the first grade your grandmother began to import, once a week from the nearby university, the services of a professor named Mr. Svevo, who taught you piano and foreign languages. Mr. Svevo was a thin, bald, dour-looking man who arrived every Saturday morning in a blue Cadillac. He dressed in fine suits, he wore polished shoes, cuff links, fedoras with bright feathers springing from their bands. Rumors swirled around this man, concerning his identity and his place in the household—it was supposed that he was your grandmother’s lover, a Nazi war criminal, one of your grandmother’s downtrodden relatives looking for Mr. Butler’s money.

  You’d taken an immediate liking to Mr. Svevo and adopted many of his airs. On the first day of grade school and every day thereafter, you arrived in a blue suit with a red pocket square. You made a habit of speaking in foreign phrases in front of your teachers and classmates. Zut alors! you said disgustedly whenever they exasperated you, J’en ai marre! Before you sat on a chair, you wiped it off with your handkerchief in an effort to protect yourself from the germs of commoners. You were, of course, despised.

  Under Mr. Svevo’s instruction you learned Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, you learned not only their notes but their feeling. You developed an ear, an eye. With Mr. Svevo’s help you eventually started composing your own music. A prodigy, I suppose, you said. When you were ten years old Mr. Svevo took you to give a concert in Fayetteville, and your performance was so celebrated that you were invited to play once a week, every Sunday morning at noon, on the local radio station. Each week you wrote a new composition. Little nothings after the fashion of Mozart, you said. But oh, I was famous. The ten-year-old composer. People recognized me everywhere, just everywhere. Once when the maid and I were in the grocery store they announced over the intercom that a special guest was in the store—me, an honored guest. The grocery store’s checkout clerk was a six-fingered woman, and going through her line, seeing that extra finger, had always nauseated you. After your appearance on the radio station she’d ventured to pat your head, and a chill had gone through you from which you’d never quite recovered. Partly it was the extra finger which chilled you. But it was partly something else. The feeling that you were special, noteworthy, the feeling that someone couldn’t help herself from reaching out and touching you.

  When the time came to send you to college, Mr. Svevo spoke to your grandmother about a connection of his at Juilliard. Your grandmother was reluctant to send you to New York, where you might fall under any kind of influence, but Mr. Svevo convinced her that with the proper instruction you might become one of the world’s great composers. This wasn’t exactly what she had planned—she was still tied to the idea of your becoming a politician—but in the end Mr. Svevo persuaded her. She bought you a set of luggage, five new suits, and sent you off like a bride. As you boarded the bus that would take you to school, your grandmother stood straight-backed, her face contorted in an effort not to cry. When the bus pulled away she waved a handkerchief at you, and its frantic movements amounted to the most outward and desperate display of emotion she’d ever given you.

  In Maine you lived at a boardinghouse called the Bavarian Inn, a large white cottage with dark wooden trim, about a mile’s walk from the restaurant. To distinguish itself from the countless other motels that ran along the same stretch of road, the Bavarian offered what it referred to on its sign as “Old World Charm.” Its first floor was a common area consisting of a dining room—where breakfast was served each morning on German pewter plates—and a living room, furnished with antiques, its walls lined with a vast selection of leather-bound classics. One of the corners of the living room was devoted to a baby grand of a rare tone and quality, which you claimed was the only reason you took your lodgings there.

  There were five rooms upstairs, all of which shared a common bathroom. Years ago, when people had been willing to tolerate shared baths, the Bavarian’s charms had attracted a great many people. But in recent years tourists had since drifted off to motels with other features—with private baths and swimming pools, air-conditioning, cable—and now the Bavarian was more or less abandoned.

  The proprietor of the Bavarian was a German woman named Mrs. Strauss, who seemed to be operating under the delusion that she was still a girl living in a prewar village nestled at the foot of the Alps. She wore her gray hair in two braids which she looped into buns above her ears, and she dressed in the same girlish outfit every day—a white short-sleeved shirt and a pair of khaki knee-length shorts, a pair of bright red socks pulled up to her knees. Mrs. Strauss had the naïve cheer of a child, a child’s sincerity. She talked of almost nothing but her girlhood village: farming, singing, hiking, goats.
She told long apocryphal stories about the village and its characters, their difficulties and their inevitable triumphs.

  On the night that you brought me to the Bavarian Mrs. Strauss was sitting in the living room, crocheting an afghan, like a mother waiting up for her child. When you introduced me, and informed Mrs. Strauss that I would be staying for a while, she acted as if she’d been expecting me her whole life. “But of course you’ll be here with us!” she said. “Your room is already made up and waiting for you.”

  She showed me upstairs to a small room just large enough to accommodate a twin bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. The bed was covered with a white matelassé spread, which Mrs. Strauss informed me she had made herself. On the nightstand was a blue bowl and pitcher. “For the purposes of washing one’s face,” said Mrs. Strauss. There was also a leather-bound collection of fairy tales. It was in just such fairy tales, I realized, that I had seen rooms like this before, and I knew that the characters who lived in them were always happy, for a time.

  The next day you made a phone call and got me a job washing dishes at the Oasis, seven nights a week, from six to midnight. The kitchen was run by a man named Houston, a retired wrestler who was so oversized he often bumped into people and sent them reeling. His wrestling persona had been that of a madman, an escaped mental patient who liked to bite the heads off of small animals. One of the prep chefs had an old newspaper clipping that showed Houston in a unitard, crouched in a stalking posture, a chicken strangled in one of his fists. “The Inmate,” it read, “Is Back and Out for Blood!” In the picture his head was shaved, and he wore a long mustache that extended well beyond the corners of his mouth. He looked menacing, bloodthirsty. Since then he had grown back his hair and shaved his mustache, but he still had a seething look about him. He was always in a furious sweat. It was hot in the kitchen—giant vats of water were kept boiling for the lobsters, the grill was fired at all times, hissing—and as Houston stood over the grill drops of his sweat would roll off his forehead and onto the fillets he was cooking, and although he never went so far as to smile, it seemed to me this satisfied him.

  Houston wouldn’t tolerate any form of what he called “fraternizing.” The waitresses would hang around talking to the lesser chefs and he’d say, “Y’all stop your fraternizing,” and point a spatula at them in a threatening way. What annoyed Houston most was the way that all of the kitchen workers would gather around and eat the leftovers sent back by customers. A plate of mussels would come in from the dining room, a few of the shells abandoned in the buttery broth, or a lobster with one of its claws still intact, and the workers would stand around prying out bits of meat, stuffing the scraps in their mouths. Houston would lose his mind. He’d come charging out from behind the grill with a knife. “Y’all get along!” he’d say. “Ya’ll stop fraternizing. Y’all making me sick in here.”

  I never did any fraternizing. I watched quietly from my corner of the kitchen as the waitresses went in and out, talking about the tables they were serving, the petty requests of spoiled customers, the amount of money people were throwing away on kids who didn’t appreciate their food. They talked about their kids, their boyfriends and their boyfriends’ kids and ex-wives, problems with money and sex, and I just stood in my corner of the kitchen, listening.

  Washing dishes wasn’t what it had once been—it merely involved scraping off plates and stacking them in a machine, then pulling down a hood and waiting for the cycle to run. When the dishes were finished I restocked them in the kitchen, brought hot glasses out to the bar. Occasionally I dropped something and had to sweep up its remains. When it was slow and there were no dishes there was always something else to do, and Houston would set me about the business of filling up the salt and pepper shakers, mixing together salad dressing, filling a pastry bag with sour cream and coiling little flowers of it into small plastic cups, to be served on the side of baked potatoes. I fell into deep, thoughtless trances and was reasonably happy. Everything I’d learned in college seemed to me now ridiculous. I had only been out for a few weeks but already I’d forgotten, or locked away, the entire history of the world, its religions, its people and its languages and its literature, its scientific advancements, its philosophical principles, its artwork, the conclusions and predictions of its noblest minds—how far away it all seemed now, how useless!

  Pills went around the kitchen, passed between the cooks and waitresses and bussers. There were different kinds—some were white, aspirin-like tablets, some were pink and shaped like eggs, some were red capsules, some were clear capsules with tiny yellow balls inside—and people swallowed them without knowing what they were taking or what the effects might be. There were different features to each of the pills, but they all shared the quality of making work slip by very easily. Everyone went about the kitchen with swift, balletic movements—they lofted heavy trays in the air and chopped vegetables and sautéed scallops and plunged lobsters into their boiling, hissing deaths—they did all of this beautifully, effortlessly, the way we move in dreams.

  I sometimes wondered where the pills came from. They were always there, always, and it didn’t seem to me that anyone actually paid for them. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the owner provided them, to grease the wheels of his machine. He was a short, skeletal man who dressed like the captain of a ship—in white pants and a blue blazer with gaudy brass buttons—and he wandered around the restaurant like the Ancient Mariner. Ten times a night he’d come through the kitchen checking to make sure that all was in working order, and he moved with the same easy fluidity that we did. Rumors went around about him—that he had dealings with the mafia, that he had once stood trial for killing a man—and I had no trouble believing any of them.

  Within a few days word got around to all the employees that I was related to Malinda, and people started coming around to talk about her. She had provided a great deal of amusement over the past few years, and people missed her. Because of her beauty she was always getting invited to parties on yachts, or in the expensive homes along the beach, and she’d often bring the rest of the waitstaff with her. These parties never ended well—people were kicked out, the police were called. Twice Malinda had been arrested and had to be bailed out of jail. Another time she had woken up in the backseat of a car in New York, with no memory of having been driven there, and she’d had to call one of the waiters to come pick her up. Several times each season someone came storming into the kitchen—a spurned lover, a jealous girlfriend, someone from whom Malinda had borrowed money but never repaid—and there were violent, spectacular, thrilling arguments. “God, I miss Malinda,” people said.

  I tried to press them for details about her—where she went in the winters, who she lived with—but it was hard for people to say. She always took off with whomever she happened to be dating at the time—she’d gone to Florida one year, Arizona the next—but no one could remember where she’d gone at the end of last season. She had a boyfriend whose name no one could remember, because he’d simply been referred to as “the Lesser Castro.”

  “One of those guys who went around in military gear,” said one of the waitresses. “He had this full beard and everything. God only knows what Malinda saw in him. I think he was actually a Communist.”

  All of these conversations ended in the same way. Whoever was talking would give me a look, like I was some kind of impostor or criminal, like I was the reason she hadn’t shown up. “How do we know,” said one of the cooks, “you’re not just some crazy person off the street, how do we know you didn’t kill her and, like, eat her? And that’s why she ain’t here?”

  During my first few shifts I expected Malinda, as you said, hourly. I imagined her showing up unannounced, kicking the door open from the dining room and abusing the chefs about a late order. She’d pile up her tray with food and settle it on her shoulder. Then she’d turn and see me, and drop everything. The kitchen would come to a halt and not even Houston would dare to speak. “Now that I see you here,” Malinda would s
ay, “I can’t for the life of me believe I ever left you.” She’d cry, fall at my feet. “Forgive me!” she’d say. “I never meant to leave you!” All the people who had looked at me skeptically would say to themselves, “I guess we were wrong. I guess they’re sisters after all. I guess nothing can keep them apart. I wish I had something like that in my life.”

  At the restaurant you were something of a petty celebrity. You were an employee, like the rest of us, but of a higher caliber—you didn’t have to get dirty, serve other people, and your work was confined to the cool elegance of the bar. On your breaks you walked through the kitchen so you could smoke in the back alley, and as you passed through you were greeted by the other employees with a mixture of respect and disdain.

  Houston always took his breaks with you—fraternizing with you was the single exception he allowed to his general rule—and the two of you sat outside smoking. Apart from being southern and longtime employees of the Oasis, you and Houston seemed to have nothing in common—in fact you seemed to hate each other. The back door was always open, and since the washer was right next to it, I often overheard you and Houston talking. Not once did I hear you talk about anything substantive—you dealt exclusively in sarcastic comments about fucking each other, and members of one another’s family.

  “Don’t be calling your momma too early tomorrow,” Houston would say, “I’m gonna be keeping her up late tonight.”

  I can tell where you learned how to wrestle so poorly, you said, your momma just lays there and takes it to the count of three.

  “Fuck you,” Houston said.

  Anytime.

  “Suck my dick.”

  Right after I’m done with your daddy’s.

  Mornings, back at the Bavarian, you were a completely different person, and it took me a number of days to get used to it. In everything that you did there you conducted yourself with the quiet dignity of a butler. You rose very early and attended to yourself in the bathroom, leaving behind the strong scent of grapefruit—your aftershave, imported from France. Then you walked down the street to a convenience store and returned with the New York Times, which you read aloud to Mrs. Strauss over breakfast. Between articles you and Mrs. Strauss passed comments back and forth, always amounting to more or less the same sentiment. What people won’t do, you said. Your speech at the Bavarian was very refined, and held no trace of the southern drawl you spoke with in the evenings. At times I even detected a slight British accent.