Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  It amazed me that she would jog in Central Park, go to Morrissey’s hair salon on Madison Avenue, walk all over without a bodyguard; but, as she said, sometimes people stopped her, though it was twenty years later, to tell her exactly what they were doing on that day in Dallas in November 1963. As I got to know her, I saw how she could do this, because of an instinctive gift to distance herself and, if necessary, to freeze someone out. In the ten years of our friendship, we had one rift that I regretted. Natasha Richardson invited me to a screening of Suddenly, Last Summer, in which she starred, and her heartfelt hope was that I could bring Jackie along. I mistook it to be a private screening, but instead there were hordes of photographers who swarmed on Jackie, asking her to look this way or that, and with a tartness she said, “Edna, this is not a private screening.”

  Next day, from a shop, she sent me a gift of a velvet drawstring purse with a note attached that read, “For a lock of your true-love’s hair.” She was not a romantic, but she held on to the shibboleths of it, to see her through the carnivore world of celebrity.

  We are to meet at a cinema on Sixty-second Street, and it is pouring with rain. I get there early, only to discover there are no films showing, as a private screening had been booked that evening. Cars and taxis, bumper to bumper, sloshing rain, and presently an argument between a taxi driver and another driver, obscenities flying, “Asshole, asshole,” as they get into the street to fight it out. The woman passenger in the taxi has slunk out and is asking me to please hide her, as she does not want to be called by the police as a witness. Both men are staggering, and like wrestlers in a comic clip, even as they maul each other, they have to cling to one another for balance, but they are not abdicating the fray.

  Jackie arrives, headscarf well down over her face and an umbrella with a spoke missing. Not that anyone notices, as all the attention is on the pugilists, cars hooting, traffic at a standstill, and the wailing sound of the sirens coming closer and closer. Jackie surveys the scene and says it is hardly one that will make it to the nice neat happenings in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” She is sorry to be late. I outline the situation about there being no movie, and walking on, we look in vain for a taxi. She suggests we take a bus, but the bus queues are miles long, and then, without a word, she nods and I follow her to the entrance of Bloomingdale’s on Third Avenue, where the chauffeurs sit. She taps on the window of the very first limousine, disturbing a driver in his nap, and in that inimitable voice, with its slight breathiness, asks, “Do you think you could take us to 1040 Fifth Avenue?” Then, with a beautiful dexterity, she pulls the headscarf back, fluffs her hair, so that, to his disbelief, he realizes he is being asked by Jackie Onassis to take her home to upper Fifth Avenue.

  That evening in her apartment there was only us, as her companion, Maurice Tempelsman, believing that we were still at the cinema, had arranged to meet us later on in a restaurant. She spoke of the Kennedy men, the undoubted and inherited magnetism and their weakness, implicitly alluding to their infidelities, which she skimmed over. Mr. Kennedy Senior was not averse to touching her knee under the table, something her husband, even as President, was resentful of. The very first time she met Jack, she “fell,” although she disguised the fact that she had fallen; she knew in her heart that by marrying him life would be a roller coaster, yet the alternative would be unthinkable. After the President’s assassination, Robert Kennedy was the one to keep her from falling apart, calling on her in her widowhood each evening, so much so that many mornings she would find that his dog was outside her door, just like Argus, the dog in Homer, awaiting Odysseus, his master. She was at her most confiding and affectionate that particular evening. I was one of the three people on the planet whom she loved most. I said, how would it be, were she and I to fall in love with the same man, at which she remonstrated, said she would want me to have him, she would be my bridesmaid, but I did not believe her.

  She had no dog then, but once upon a time she and Ari Onassis did have one. In most of the salons in New York small dogs presided, nestling on woven tapestry cushions that bore the exact likenesses of them. The film producer Tom Johnson was the one who told me the story about Ari’s dog and Jackie’s froideur. Late one night he was walking down Fifth Avenue with a very pretty young girl, when they chanced to meet Onassis walking the dog. They were invited up, and Jackie, who was preparing for bed, was none too cordial. To make matters worse, Ari flirted with the young girl, who was both dazzled and slightly tipsy, and the visit was cut short. The next day Jackie had a large bouquet of flowers sent to the girl, with a card bearing Onassis’s signature. The girl subsequently made a fool of herself and rang Onassis, who did not even remember her. It told me something about Jackie and that inscrutable trait that is the essence both of power and of the handmaidens of power. She was different from the other women, at once more amenable, more indiscreet, and yet aloof. She might grace this or that gathering, arriving like the costumed fairy queen who would mingle for a short while and then vanish. She was a reader, she worked in a publishing house, and she loved literature. She wrote to me about my books and the books of others. Once, when I sent her Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle from Loeb’s bookshop on Madison Avenue, that same night she penned a three-page letter, extolling this Polish poet she had never heard of. Her last letter to me, on notepaper the color of dark blue hyacinth, as she was dying, was full of hope, the spring, things we would do, life at full tilt again. It was not sentimentality; it was self-preservation. Long before she was a First Lady, she had the certainty of one who was cherished, and the little girl in her held on to that; it was her armor, and it saw her through varying nightmares with astonishing poise. Ironically, Marilyn Monroe, who in her sheath dress sang the birthday tribute for President Kennedy in 1962 (when Jackie was noticeably absent), had no sheath at all, the little girl in her had been cut to the core. Jackie was the opposite, she went through life veiled, and left it with her stardust intact.

  New York friendships survived the long intervals, and each time I returned, it seemed that they were just waiting to be resumed. Roger Straus would come from his office in Union Square to take me to lunch at La Côte Basque, that bastion of civilization that had been the setting for Truman Capote’s unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. Roger, so dapper in his white suit and silk handkerchief, with a zest for gossip and an uncanny instinct for literature. Of all his authors, and I counted myself fortunate to be one of them, his avowed favorite was Joseph Brodsky, and he would carry one of Joseph’s books around, just to show it.

  Brodsky was a brilliant, bristling man, with a cold scorn for “literary filibusters.” It was a catchphrase of his, along with “cat’s pajamas,” sundry words that he had picked up. He had a liking for the ballad “The Night Before Larry Was Stretched,” which Brendan Behan had sung to him. It was a droll song of Larry about to be executed, when his friends, a bunch of Dublin bowsies, pawned their clothes in order to buy enough drink to sit all night for the wake, to give him a good send-off with drink and snuff and cards and song, before the noose was tied.

  Joseph had the generosity of a pharaoh, and often, with David Rieff, I would be invited to the Russian Samovar, where Roman, the owner, would welcome us. Once he gave me a gift of a blue china egg, which I wore for luck. Joseph and Roman might have just arrived in New York City, out of Russia—not totalitarian Russia, with its poisonings and its purges, but the great Mother Russia of the steppes and the tundras that had given birth to such complex and subversive geniuses as Pushkin, Gogol, Mandelstam, and Bulgakov, whom Joseph quoted with a plenary flourish. There was no mention of his enforced times in mental institutions or prison in the cold north or the fact that he stood trial as a “parasite” before being expelled. All his life he had fought for poetry, and he won. He made jokes: Comrade Gorbachev had a mustache, as had Comrade Stalin, the Kremlin mountaineer, whose name was also that of a Georgian boot polish. We sometimes sparred over Chekhov, because he agreed with his muse, Anna Akhmatova, who h
ad included him in her Rosary cycle of poems, saying that Chekhov was “uniformly drab, a sea of mud, with absence of heroism and martyrdom, absence of depth and darkness and sublimity.” Pasternak did not think that, as I would remind Joseph, but peace was restored by his acknowledgment of the fact that “Ward No. 6” was a great story. The vodka came in little cruets, which because of their bright colors were deceptively harmless, and I cannot say that we were totally sober when Roman would bring us to the inner room, to inscribe the visitors book, where Joseph had already written and deleted several lines in Russian. One night they walked me from West Fifty-fourth Street to West Fifty-eighth, two chanting dervishes, reciting Pushkin in their native tongue, their voices deep and sonorous, rolling their r’s, their sounds so alien, yet accruing an audience who, though they did not understand it, felt the passion of the words.

  The streets of New York always seemed to me to have more life, more immediacy, than those soulless apartment buildings with their long, lonely corridors, dark brown carpets, newspapers several days old, and a deathly, suspenseful hush, like that in the great novels of Georges Simenon.

  Whenever I could, I would be outdoors, and even in winter, I would choose a bench outside a café on Sixty-fourth Street and sit there to see the world go by. It was December, Christmas in full swing, Santa a block away, his shabby shoes in glaring contrast to the festive red and white, and in the side garden of the Catholic church snow had lodged on various bushes, making white floppy flowers the size of cauliflowers. There were the voices and the jingle bells, snatches of life stories, dissension on cell phones, the caterwauling of the horns, and birds scrabbling for crumbs. Many of the women who went by wore fur coats, and you could see the shiver on the thinner hairs of the collars where the wind ruffled them. People were hustling and jogging, mothers pushed strollers, two women paused to look at the price of cakes in the café and backed off, affronted, one saying, “You know what… I’ll bake my own.” A wife, who with her husband, Ted, had recently seen a very raunchy play, was telling her friend how, since then, life at home got “so degenerate.” In the midst of all that medley, a young Asian boy passed along, carrying a white orchid in a box, snug in its bed of tissue, his pride in it as great as if he were carrying the Olympic torch. The woman sitting next to me on the narrow seat coughed repeatedly and said flowers always got to her. There were art galleries across the way, so rarefied that only a connoisseur would dare go in. But higher up on the same buildings were the makeshift showrooms, and air-conditioning boxes, black and sooted, hanging off the windows.

  I made friends and acquaintances all over New York. I had often gone downtown to see quacks who were to lead me to my inner self, my combat zone, and my pleasure-seeking endorphins. An astrologer had me in her clutches, and before each session her elderly mother relieved me of two hundred dollars, the twenty obligatory red roses, and a piece of jewelry. It was there, too, one Sunday, at one of those apartments, that I was invited to meet the beautiful Japanese artist Kazuko. She was famous for her crystals, which were like so many thousand flowers—fobs, pendants, rings, and necklaces, little worlds that brimmed with light, the light of sunsets, the light of yellow muscatel, the light of pink roses and lapis and sapphire and rubies shimmering away on strips of white cloth. Later she moved to Fifty-seventh Street, to an apartment that looked out on the mists and sunrises and sunsets of Central Park. Whereas formerly she had worn black, she was now wearing white, as in bridal array for a groom. That groom would be the “Bobby Bird.”

  One morning on her windowsill there was a wounded bird, small and brownish and to all intents almost dead. She took it in, nursed it back to life, fed it glucose and honey from a pipette, and had its broken wing removed. Soon it flopped about, though bandaged, and Bobby Bird was almost ready to start his trills, which, alas, lacked the sweetness of music. She had read somewhere that birds, each night, dream the songs they will sing, and so she decided to enrich the dreams of her little charge by playing Mozart all the time. Her studio was filled with the sounds of Mozart, and after I had gone home, her letters would be filled with news of Bobby’s prowess, singing to his heart’s content, no interest or curiosity about the world beyond, no yen to escape to one of the trees in Central Park and the morning dews. She would dilate on Bobby’s burgeoning genius with song, on how they had graduated to Bach’s Oratorio, her pride in him like a mother’s who sees her child excel at school, not forgetting to mention his tantrums and irrational jealousy when buyers came to look at her most recent collection.

  Whenever I arrived at the Wyndham, there would be a gift from her waiting for me, a necklace or a ring, and a further account of Bobby’s expanding repertoire. When I visited her, bringing white flowers now she wore only white, I would have to endure Bobby’s tantrums, as he flicked the crystals that bedecked his cage, the very crystals that contained the special healing powers chosen for his highly strung temperament and that he was threatening to destroy.

  Then one year I came and found no package at the Wyndham. In the hall of her apartment the elderly porter, recognizing me, came out from behind the desk, throwing his hands up helplessly. I did not have to be told it to know that the Bobby Bird and his owner were gone.

  I would be driven to City College by a man called George, who kept a Sten gun under his seat. He was a fast talker, and on each journey I got a summary of the nightly murders, rapes, and robberies. Leaving Park Avenue and going north for several blocks into Harlem was like entering another country, the brownstones crumbling and dilapidated, the streets almost empty, the few children on the sidewalks and men, alone or in a group, staring out but looking inward, while George filled me in on the latest crime rate. It was before Harlem’s second Renaissance, when tourists were lured by soul food and gospel music. I thought of Lorca, who had walked there in 1930, when he was a student at Columbia, seeing it as a place eclipsed, sensing what he called the “garnet violence” running in the blood.

  Because I never went to university, I always found the environs of any campus forbidding, what with all those bicycles and lockers and gowns and anonymity. In the classroom itself, I was conscious of Vladimir Nabokov’s unbending proprietorial judgment, berating the “buxom best-sellers.” The other teacher that came to my mind was Joyce, with his dilatory methods, swerving from one subject to the next, the courtesans of ancient China and the pregnancy of the Virgin Mary.

  I would read to my students at first, something stirring, the escalating glee of Iago’s jealousy, or Faulkner’s biblical parables of the Deep South, but they were more eager to have their own work read and did not take too fondly to my reminding them of Lorca’s edict for the writer: “true poetry, true effort and renunciation.” One of the students was Walter Mosley, who was eager to learn, whose tastes were eclectic, and who understood the tug and traction of a perfect short story. It intrigued me long after, when he had published his famous Easy Rawlins series of crime fiction books, that I had called him aside one day and said, “You’re black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing, there are writing riches therein.”

  On the days when I did not teach, I corrected the students’ work, wrote the reports, and then walked around New York as I had never done in any other city.

  Sometimes it was as if I saw ghosts, or certainly saw things that other New Yorkers had not seen. Once, I was on my way to Traveller magazine, which at that time was on Madison Avenue near Thirtieth Street, when at a corner I saw a group of black men, wearing caps, silent, elderly, all with sticks, waiting, as I believed, for an appointed onslaught. There was something so apprehensive about them, standing there, like avenging figures from the Old Testament, waiting for their doom.

  Often I would repair to the seventh floor of the Home Section of Bergdorf Goodman. It was filled with treasures: tables, coffee tables, tallboys, whatnots, exquisite plates, glasses, ivories, cranberry bells, a veritable palace that my mother would have reveled in. One day on the escalator I sighted an outfit in the fashion department and immediately jumped off
at the next floor to have a look at it. Designed by Valentino, it was a beautiful green silk georgette with pale, embossed rosettes of gold. I went week after week, watching, waiting for the price to be marked down. Each time I returned, I was certain that it would be gone, but it wasn’t, it was waiting for me. Then one week it reached a figure that, though still exorbitant, I could just afford. To my dismay, it was a two-piece, when what I wanted was a jacket without the matching, skimpy miniskirt. A manageress was called. She was Chinese and smiled bafflingly at my pathetic request. Eventually, for seven hundred dollars, the jacket was mine, and as I held it, in its folds of wrapping, I might have been holding my trousseau. On the seventh floor, I sometimes imagined what it would be like to be a wife, a wife of privilege, that is, with several packages, being escorted to the side door, where a chauffeur would be waiting to take her to a white house, upstate—the gravel nicely raked, the wide lawn bordered with cedar trees, onyx lamps at “his and her” sides of the enormous bed—but then I would remember the stories of John Cheever—rancid marriages, drink, infidelities—and my daydream would come to an abrupt end.

  It was in a lamp shop that I had my next little adventure. For some time I had been admiring an orange lamp, the glass shade of which had the delicate droop of a toadstool and was dotted with brown speckled spots. It would not, I reckoned, be too awkward to carry home. Eventually I went in to inquire the price. I was greeted profusely. The young man, in a black suit and black suede shoes, moved with a stealthlike ease. He was Middle Eastern, and his voice was very quiet, saying what an honor it was to have me drop by.

  Presently he was reeling off his credentials. He had been to Cornell and afterward to Harvard Business School, but his real interest was the esoteric. He ran the store only to please his old man. When he heard that I was a writer, his interest quickened. He had stories to tell, stories that would make my hair stand on end. Hinting at a racy past that might easily have slipped from the pages of The Arabian Nights, he said that if we got to know one another, he might share some of these adventures with me. We could collaborate: his vast experience, my craft, wow, man, we could have a movie deal. The lamp was mine. For nothing. He was no tomcat, no sir, he could have all the ditzy blondes he wished for, all the alimony junkies who hung around, except that he had taste, he had soul, and he had the esoteric. He was suggesting that he and I go across to the Plaza Hotel, where he kept a permanent suite, so there would be no hassle at the desk with passport or ID. The suite was massive, two bathrooms, and the color scheme was soothing. I began to envisage scenarios. I would be in a kimono, oyster silk, eating Turkish delight or sherbet off a wooden spoon. I would be the Emma Bovary that Woody Allen put into a short story, who, having got a taste of the high life, refused to go back into the novel and commit suicide. Then again I would be a corpse, zipped up in a black plastic bag and brought out by the servants’ entrance. He saw that I was hesitating, and presently I was the proud possessor of two lamps, which he would have shipped to London. The second lamp was green, the green of a grotto, and I imagined them on a table or a desk at home, winter evening, gray London light, and those bewitching lamps with veins of color rippling through them.