by Anne Bernays
“Pretty bracelet,” I said. “Have I seen it before?”
“Oh this? Kate gave it to me; she bought it out of her allowance. Isn’t it nice? I mean it probably cost her all of five dollars, but to me it’s valuable because she’s my daughter.” Then, almost so softly I could hardly hear her she said, “And we almost lost her. . . .”
So I had given Kate a gift and she had given her mother a gift. It had a certain symmetry.
Phyllis said she was going to keep an eye on me, and if I didn’t feel better in an hour or so she was going to call the doctor. I wanted to sleep but I was too nervous. Grete had shaken me—“I know about other things.” What things? There could only be one thing. And if I was right, what was she going to do about it?
“Phyllis?”
“Yes?”
“Where’s Grete from? I mean she isn’t American.”
“She’s from Latvia,” Phyllis said. “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I feel a little stupid not knowing anything about the people who work for me in this house.”
“You know something about Barry, don’t you?”
“Grete’s not married, right?”
“She was,” Phyllis said. “She has a daughter in Chicago. She misses her. They get to see each other about once a year.” Phyllis finished whatever it was she had been doing, bustling around, putting away some items, lining up others; she called it “straightening.” She stood over me, a great magenta bird, as I lay on our bed. She crossed her arms. “How are you feeling now?” she said. “Any better?”
“Well, now that you ask, it makes me feel lousy to realize you know all about Grete and I know virtually nothing. I do care about other people.”
“I know you do, Walt. Men don’t bother about those kinds of things.”
“Grete needs glasses,” I said. “She asked for a raise.”
Phyllis seemed startled by this announcement. “I take care of those things,” Phyllis said. “You’ve never had anything to do with the servants’ concerns.”
I told her I had no idea why Grete had decided to apply to me rather than to her for a raise. “Maybe she thinks I’m a softer touch.”
Phyllis had drawn a light quilt up over me. She was frowning, possibly a sign of concern, probably something else. I asked when Grete had last been given a raise. Phyllis said about a year ago. We agreed she did her work well in spite of making a couple of bad mistakes, like over-roasted turkey and a soufflé that had failed to rise and lay in the bottom of the casserole like a piece of blotting paper. Otherwise, her meals were pretty good (though hardly what James Beard would have awarded a blue ribbon). She was never sick and hadn’t, as far as I knew—and up until a few minutes earlier—complained about working conditions in our house or anything else. She didn’t filch our booze or stagger into the house after her day off. A quiet, functioning retainer. That I suspected her motives and was frightened by the possibilities this opened up, I had to keep to myself. I had to act as if what I was saying to my wife was what I was really thinking. This was hard work; it’s hard work to pull a lie along behind you, it’s fucking heavy. I imagine this is what normal men go through when they’re messing around with a woman. The only difference was that my lover was a man and he lived in my house, and now my cook was trying to shake me down and I didn’t have the balls to tell her to get lost. I didn’t have the balls to remove myself, more or less surgically, from a situation that could only get worse. I had lived my romantic fantasy for so long that I had begun to believe that it would never end.
MEANWHILE, LIFE at Griffin went on much as before. With Charlie’s help, I hired a young man with a Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale to be Mme. Baroney’s ghost. She had got herself one of the most prominent literary agents, possessed of shark-like instincts and skills. This woman insisted that Lucille Baroney’s name would be the only one on the title page. Fortunately, that was okay with my young scholar who told me that the only reason he was doing this was for the money. His friends, he said, were “aghast” at his assignment. I could have asked him why he chose this demeaning job instead of teaching in some nice clean school like Exeter or New Trier High, but I refrained because I didn’t want to hear any more about the lives of people whom I might not ever see again. I was capable of taking in just so much personal information—in the same way I could never go around and study more than four or five rooms of paintings at the Met or any museum, without my eyes beginning to swirl like a Van Gogh landscape. Just so much and then I shut down.
I did have a minimal curiosity about the young man, whose name I sometimes forgot: Ray Brody. About the business of publishing he was green from the toes up (which made it easier for me to maneuver him) and, I suspect, he was one of “us,” although I couldn’t possibly ask him or try to get him to confess. We were a despised lot; the descriptive “gay” had just begun to circulate. Given enough drink—and only in the company of men like ourselves—we might act “gay” from time to time, but mainly we were anxious, worried that people would discover our secret and punish us for loving other men. I gave Ray a tiny office and an electric typewriter and an expense account, and sent him off to Somerville to interview his subject. There, I said to myself, that’s one problem taken care of. What’s next?
I enjoyed my work at Griffin and found I could do it without going through emotional hoops. Maybe this was because I had so much more on my mind that had nothing whatever to do with the job I was being paid for; this was like playing Monopoly. It didn’t really matter whether you won or lost. But loving Barry was like walking across a mile-high gorge on a swinging bridge made from ancient vines, like the one in The Bridge of San Louis Rey. And everyone knows what happened to that bridge and all who were on it.
When I got home one evening, Phyllis announced that she and Kate were going to spend the weekend with her sister in Connecticut. Just the two of them. Phyllis said she needed to spend some time alone with her daughter with no one else there. What about Henry? Henry, she said, was not a girl. Girls needed their mothers. Whose idea was this?
“I hear you and your mother are going to Aunt Margo’s house next weekend.”
Kate nodded. Actually I’d looked all over the house and finally found her in her bedroom at the desk, doing homework. I noticed that her blond hair was growing darker. She turned halfway around to halfway face me. “Whose idea was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She seemed annoyed. “Why? What difference does it make? They have a swimming pool.”
“I know,” I said. Then I put my foot in it. “Don’t you want me to come along? I could use a couple of days in the country.”
“If Mom wanted you along she would have asked you,” Kate said. “I don’t care either way.”
“You’re being extremely rude,” I told her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be.” Was she wearing the pendant? Yes, she was!
I wondered why I was making a fuss over their trip. I didn’t particularly want to go to Connecticut with them. In fact, their being away from home would mean more time for me and Barry. But when I asked how they were going to get to Newtown, I found out they were taking the car; Aunt Margo had a room for Barry over the garage. The unspoken thing lay between us, quietly gnashing its teeth. I wanted badly to ask Kate what exactly she knew and even to try to explain myself. This would be quite a trick. I live with your momma and together we conceived you and Henry, and I also love Barry with a love so ferocious, so mindless, it’s hard to breathe. Looking at him when he’s unaware of being watched turns me from an ordinary human being with a sophisticated brain and (with the exception of this one small area) good judgment into a lovesick idiot.
Barry said, “I didn’t have a choice, boss.” He rubbed my head.
I told him to have a good time in the country.
I felt sorry for myself. I was so accustomed to having things go the way I wanted, that when everything seemed to be going the wrong way I didn’t know how to handle it. I was home alone e
xcept for Henry, who had retreated to his bedroom where he was reading god knows what. Other boys read smutty books, Henry studied college physics textbooks. He was teaching himself Russian. He was one of those kids other children dislike and adults cotton to. Henry and I got along fairly well; minding his own business seemed very important to him. I settled down with the newest Fleming manuscript and soon found myself deep in the world of his characters. It was a love story of sorts, specifically between a retired air force colonel and a nurse with left-leaning ideas. Somehow his writerly skill made them not so much realistic as real. Their intensity was real, they hurt, you hurt. I was annoyed that Fleming could be so persuasive when he really didn’t give a damn about most people’s feelings. How did he do it?
“Mr. Samson?”
It was Grete again. My heart leapt up, as they say, but not the way the nurse’s did when she saw her beau minus his clothes in Fleming’s novel.
She was wearing her uniform. Twin crescents of perspiration darkened the cloth under her arms. It wasn’t the prettiest sight.
“Come in, Grete. What can I do for you?”
“Will you be here for dinner, Mr. Samson? And Mr. Henry?”
I told her I thought we would both be here but not to bother cooking anything special—some of that excellent ham we had the night before and maybe a small salad.
Was that all? Not by a long shot.
“There’s one more thing, sir,” she said, striding solidly into the room, and facing me. “It’s my daughter in Chicago.”
“Yes,” I said. “How is she?”
“She’s not so good, Mr. Samson. She was getting very tired, like in the morning right after breakfast she’d have to go back to bed. So she went to see her doctor. He found something in her blood. She needs to have it, I can’t remember the word she said . . .”
“Monitored?”
“That’s it. That’s the word. It means she has to go to his office once a month. It’s very expensive.” She stood there, solid as a Maillol statue. I didn’t ask her to sit down because I knew she would refuse. Grete had the upper hand, but she was still the dutiful servant.
Her eyes bulged and glistened with tears. She took a handkerchief from the pocket over her left breast and patted her eyes. “She can’t afford it, Mr. Samson. She’s got two little babies and her husband run out on her last year . . .”
“What would you like me to do?” I said. I had learned a technique from negotiating with agents over the years: you never say straight off what you’re willing to pay, you ask them what they want. This small ploy gives you a decided edge, like acing your first serve.
“Well sir, let me see.” She closed her eyes briefly, probably doing some lightning-fast calculation. “I think two thousand dollars to pay the doctor for a year, probably.”
“Two thousand?”
“That would cover what she needs . . .”
Grete may have been a shakedown artist but she was no actress; the tears for her daughter were genuine. So the truth of all this was somewhere in the middle. Her daughter— whose name I didn’t know—was probably sickish, and at the same time Grete was asking me for more than the daughter needed. Life is complicated.
I asked Grete what her daughter’s name was. “She’s Vera. I named her after my mother, rest her soul.”
I had made a mistake. With a name, the daughter had achieved a reality she didn’t have before. I shouldn’t have asked. I was upset with myself. I told Grete that I would have to speak with Mrs. Samson and, in words all too similar to those of our last exchange, I said that I thought we would be able to help her.
Grete thanked me with an earnestness that betrayed anxiety. I don’t suppose she was accustomed to blackmailing an employer and it made her unremarkably nervous. I wondered what she would do if I failed to meet her price? Would she go to Phyllis and tell her about Barry? How would Phyllis react? She might ask for proof or some minimal evidence. Grete would tell Phyllis that she had seen Mr. Samson come out of Barry’s room late at night more than once, many times. Phyllis might respond that she didn’t believe her and fire Grete for telling lies about Mr. Samson. Or she might say that she was grateful for the bad news and would ask Mr. Samson about this matter, and thank you very much for letting me know what’s going on in this house. Or she might simply cut her off during the first few words spoken. “I don’t listen to tales out of school.”
What did I really want? It was getting to be a nasty habit, this asking myself what I really wanted. Sometimes I saw myself as controlled by a malevolent spirit determined to keep me and free will apart. I felt as if I were half buried in muck, maybe even quicksand, and I was sinking deeper and deeper into the ooze until all you would be able to see of me were a few strands of hair on the top of my scalp. It occurred to me that perhaps, on some level, I wanted Phyllis to find out from someone other than me and then kick me out. And keep Grete, who made such a delicious pot roast, surrounded by glazed carrots and small red potatoes and swimming in a pond of rich brown gravy. We were just over a decade beyond the war when meat had been scarcer than single male civilians, and the taste of juicy meat sat on your tongue like a gift from an angel; you didn’t want to swallow, you just wanted to savor it forever.
To realize I was less than brave was nothing new. The status quo was too charming—literally charming. It kept me in a domestic situation that gave me everything I needed—or thought I needed. Who but a fool would want to abandon it? And wasn’t I just the coolest cat at work, so smart and smooth, so well-dressed, polite, and willing to bend and compromise, never raising my voice over accidents or errors the way some of my colleagues did, throwing their weight around by screaming and scaring poor Wellesley girls out of their panties. I was considered to be a grown-up, a mensch—though very few of my colleagues would have known what this word meant.
WE BEGAN to get responses to the bound galleys of the new Fleming novel we had sent out at considerable expense to so-called opinion-makers and influential friends of the author. They were a publisher’s dream. Words like “riveting,” “emotionally satisfying,” “gripping,” “ravishing,” “illuminating,” and other assorted “ing” adjectives, as well as “incandescent,” and several more words that seemed to me to be praising some other book, say Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Well, everyone hopes their prose will land on the book jacket or in some other promotional material. I repeat, a publisher’s dream and well worth the money spent on producing the galleys. Fleming was pleased. “Guess I still have the old touch,” he said modestly. You couldn’t help liking a man who liked himself so much. The Literary Guild liked it too and made it a main selection. Was there no stopping him? Fleming’s achievement was comparable to having Cary Grant agree to star in your movie.
So while the walls were developing fault lines at home, things at the office were sturdier than they had been in a long time—although Fleming carried more weight, financially speaking, than most of our other authors put together. Baroney’s brainy ghost, Ray Brody, had extracted a plausible narrative—in outline form—from the old lady, and was exuberant about the project. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages,” he told me over the phone. “And to think I wasted all those years in the academy.”
Charlie McCann had settled back in his office editing several “important” books, one about the Cold War, another about racial segregation in public schools, and a novel, slight but appealing, about a soldier based in Germany who falls in love with the daughter of a Nazi. When I brought up the Baroney business he just shrugged and said, “It was a lark.”
I told Miss Garter that I was going to lunch and reminded her to make a note of my calls, something she failed to do from time to time. This was serious, possibly grounds for getting herself canned, but I couldn’t do it; she was so agreeable in so many ways, never second-guessed me. I figured she’d had a very strict upbringing because she always lowered her head just a little after I asked her to do something, as if I were the parish priest during communion. She dressed
accordingly, always a skirt, a blouse buttoned up almost to her chin, and a cardigan sweater; while the secretaries and editorial assistants and the girls in promotion and advertising followed fashions in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue (copies of which they shared), trying to pick up at discount stores below Thirty-Fourth Street what Bendel’s and Bergdorf’s sold for much, much more. These girls chattered like birds in an aviary, and focused more on what was on their backs than on a page of type. Phyllis said it was important for them to feel attractive, and to be attractive you must dress in the latest style. I thought this made a certain amount of sense, but I couldn’t see wasting so much time on it.
“Are you meeting someone for lunch, Mr. Samson? I haven’t made a reservation for you.”
I assured her that she hadn’t forgotten anything. “I’m eating in my own company today,” I said. “A rare treat.”
She smiled happily at my lame joke. I wondered if she had ever been tagged by a man.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and crossed Sixth Avenue to Mel’s Coffee Shop. No one I knew ate there. I got up on a stool, the round kind with a leather seat that you can spin in a complete circle. I ordered a tuna fish sandwich on rye and a vanilla frappe. The man behind the counter recognized me and called me by name, remarking that he hadn’t seen me for a while. I told him it had been a very busy time. When I bit into the sandwich I was almost overcome by the marvelous flavor of mashed fish and mayonnaise, and something sweetly sour. This vacation from fancy meals—sparring with agents over lunches that cost as much as a month’s wages for most of the world’s population—restored my optimism, and encouraged me to feel that I was up to dealing with the fraught situation that involved Kate and Grete and Barry and Phyllis. I must be crazy, I told myself. What does a man want except a little love, a little peace? I didn’t need a headshrinker to tell me that I had devised and constructed my own snake pit. Nobody made me do it, no one set me up, and no one instructed me to follow my less than “normal” impulses. The trick was: could I climb out without hurting myself— and others near and dear?
