“Nothing. I wasn’t going to pick a fight with her even if I could speak the language. A month of hunting apartments was enough for me.”
“We have a lease,” said George.
“Leases have been broken.”
“She wouldn’t do it—she needs the money.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Grace.
“It burns me up,” George said. “Why shouldn’t the girl use the elevator to lug the clothes up to the roof? Five floors is a long haul.”
“Apparently none of the other girls does,” Grace said. “I saw one of them carrying a basket of wash up the stairs on her head.”
“They ought to join the acrobats’ union.”
“We have to stick to their customs.”
“I’d still like to tell the old dame off.”
“This is Rome, George, not Chicago. You came here of your own free will.”
“Where’s Eleonora?” George asked.
“In the kitchen.”
George went into the kitchen. Eleonora was washing the children’s supper dishes in a pan of hot water. When George came in she looked up with fear, the fear in her left eye shining more brightly than in her right.
“I’m sorry about the business in the hall,” George said with sympathy, “but why didn’t you tell me about it this afternoon?”
“I don’t want to make trouble.”
“Would you like me to talk to the signora?”
“No, no.”
“I want you to ride in the elevator if you want to.”
“Thank you, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“I’m always crying, Signore. Don’t bother to notice it.”
“Have it your own way,” George said.
He thought that ended it, but a week later as he came into the building at lunchtime he saw Eleonora getting into the elevator with a laundry bundle. The portinaia had just opened the door for her with her key, but when she saw George she quickly ducked down the stairs to the basement. George got on the elevator with Eleonora. Her face was crimson.
“I see you don’t mind using the elevator,” he said.
“Ah, Signore”—she shrugged—“we must all try to improve ourselves.”
“Are you no longer afraid of the signora?”
“Her girl told me the signora is sick,” Eleonora said happily.
Eleonora’s luck held, George learned, because the signora stayed too sick to be watching the elevator, and one day after the maid rode up in it to the roof, she met a plumber’s helper working on the washtubs, Fabrizio Occhiogrosso, who asked her to go out with him on her next afternoon off. Eleonora, who had been doing little on her Thursday and Sunday afternoons off, mostly spending her time with the portinaia, readily accepted. Fabrizio, a short man with pointed shoes, a thick trunk, hairy arms, and the swarthy face of a Spaniard, came for her on his motorbike and away they would go together, she sitting on the seat behind him, holding both arms around his belly. She sat astride the seat, and when Fabrizio, after impatiently revving the Vespa, roared up the narrow street, the wind fluttered her skirt and her bare legs were exposed above the knees.
“Where do they go?” George once asked Grace.
“She says he has a room on the Via della Purificazióne.”
“Do they always go to his room?”
“She says they sometimes ride to the Borghese Gardens or go to the movies.”
One night in early December, after the maid had mentioned that Fabrizio was her fiance now, George and Grace stood at their living-room window looking down into the street as Eleonora got on the motorbike and it raced off out of sight.
“I hope she knows what she’s doing,” he muttered in a worried tone. “I don’t much take to Fabrizio.”
“So long as she doesn’t get pregnant too soon. I’d hate to lose her.”
George was silent for a time, then remarked, “How responsible do you suppose we are for her morals?”
“Her morals?” laughed Grace. “Are you batty?”
“I never had a maid before,” George said.
“This is our third.”
“I mean in principle.”
“Stop mothering the world,” said Grace.
Then one Sunday after midnight Eleonora came home on the verge of fainting. What George had thought might happen had. Fabrizio had taken off into the night on his motorbike. When they had arrived at his room early that evening, a girl from Perugia was sitting on his bed. The portiere had let her in after she had showed him an engagement ring and a snapshot of her and Fabrizio in a rowboat. When Eleonora demanded to know who this one was, the plumber’s helper did not bother to explain but ran down the stairs, mounted his Vespa, and drove away. The girl disappeared. Eleonora wandered the streets for hours, then returned to Fabrizio’s room. The portiere told her that he had been back, packed his valise, and left for Perugia, the young lady riding on the back seat.
Eleonora dragged herself home. When she got up the next morning to make breakfast she was a skeleton of herself and the gobbo looked like a hill. She said nothing and they asked nothing. What Grace wanted to know she later got from the portinaia. Eleonora no longer ran through her chores but did everything wearily, each movement like flowing stone. Afraid she would collapse, George advised her to take a week off and go home. He would pay her salary and give her something extra for the bus.
“No, Signore,” she said dully, “it is better for me to work.” She said, “I have been through so much, more is not noticeable.”
But then she had to notice it. One afternoon she absentmindedly picked up Grace’s keys and got on the elevator with a bag of clothes to be washed. The signora, having recovered her health, was waiting for her. She flung open the door, grabbed Eleonora by the arm as she was about to close the elevator door, and dragged her out.
“Whore,” she cried, “don’t steal the privileges of your betters. Use the stairs.”
Grace opened the apartment door to see what the shouting was about, and Eleonora, with a yowl, rushed past her. She locked herself in her room and sat there all afternoon without moving. She wept copiously. Grace, on the verge of exhaustion, could do nothing with her. When George came home from work that evening he tried to coax her out, but she shouted at him to leave her alone.
George was thoroughly fed up. “I’ve had enough,” he said. He thought out how he would handle the signora, then told Grace he was going across the hall.
“Don’t do it,” she shouted, but he was already on his way.
George knocked on the signora’s door. She was a woman of past sixty-five, a widow, always dressed in black. Her face was long and gray, but her eyes were bright black. Her husband had left her these two apartments across the hall from each other that he had owned outright. She lived in the smaller and rented the other, furnished, at a good rent. George knew that this was her only source of income. She had once been a schoolteacher.
“Scusi, Signora,” said George, “I have come with a request.”
“Prego.” She asked him to sit.
George took a chair near the terrace window. “I would really appreciate it, Signora, if you will let our girl go into the elevator with the laundry when my wife sends her up to the tubs. She is not a fortunate person and we would like to make her life a little easier for her.”
“I am sorry,” answered the signora with dignity, “but I can’t permit her to enter the elevator.”
“She’s a good girl and you have upset her very much.”
“Good,” said the signora, “I am glad. She must remember her place, even if you don’t. This is Italy, not America. You must understand that we have to live with these people long after you, who come to stay for a year or two, return to your own country.”
“Signora, she does no harm in the elevator. We are not asking you to ride with her. After all, the elevators are a convenience for all who live in this house and therefore ought to be open for those who work for us here.”
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“No,” said the signora.
“Why not think it over and let me know your answer tomorrow? I assure you I wouldn’t ask this if I didn’t think it was important.”
“I have thought it over,” she said stiffly, “and I have given you the same answer I will give tomorrow.”
George got up. “In that case,” he said, “if you won’t listen to reason, I consider my lease with you ended. You have had your last month’s rent. We will move on the first of February.”
The signora looked as if she had just swallowed a fork.
“The lease is a sacred contract,” she said, trembling. “It is against the law to break it.”
“I consider that you have already broken it,” George said quietly, “by creating conditions that make it very hard for my family to function in this apartment. I am simply acknowledging a situation that already exists.”
“If you move out, I will take a lawyer and make you pay for the whole year.”
“A lawyer will cost you half the rent he might collect,” George answered. “And if my lawyer is better than yours, you will get nothing and owe your lawyer besides.”
“Oh, you Americans,” said the signora bitterly. “How well I understand you. Your money is your dirty foot with which you kick the world. Who wants you here,” she cried, “with your soaps and toothpastes and your dirty gangster movies!”
“I would like to remind you that my origin is Italian,” George said.
“You have long ago forgotten your origin,” she shouted.
George left the apartment and went back to his own.
“I’ll bet you did it,” Grace greeted him. Her face was ashen.
“I did,” said George.
“I’ll bet you fixed us good. Oh, you ought to be proud. How will we ever find another apartment in the dead of winter with two kids?”
She left George and locked herself in the children’s bedroom. They were both awake and got out of bed to be with her.
George sat in the living room in the dark. I did it, he was thinking.
After a while the doorbell rang. He got up and put on the light. It was the signora and she looked unwell. She entered the living room at George’s invitation and sat there with great dignity.
“I am sorry I raised my voice to a guest in my house,” she said. Her mouth was loose and her eyes glistened.
“I am sorry I offended you,” George said.
She did not speak for a while, then said, “Let the girl use the elevator.” The signora broke into tears.
When she had dried her eyes, she said, “You have no idea how bad things have become since the war. The girls are disrespectful. Their demands are endless, it is impossible to keep up with them. They talk back, they take every advantage. They crown themselves with privileges. It is a struggle to keep them in their place. After all, what have we left when we lose our self-respect?” The signora wept heartbrokenly.
After she had gone, George stood at the window. Across the street a beggar played a flute.
I didn’t do it well, George thought. He felt depressed.
On her afternoon off Eleonora rode up and down on the elevator.
1957
An Exorcism
FOGEL, a writer, had had another letter from Gary Simson, the would-be writer, a request as usual. He wrote fiction but hadn’t jelled. Fogel, out of respect, saved letters from writers but was tempted not to include Simson although he had begun to publish. I am not his mentor, though he calls himself my student. If so what have I taught him? In the end he placed the letter in his files. I have his others, he thought.
Eli Fogel was a better than ordinary writer but not especially “successful.” He disliked the word. His productivity was limited by his pace which, for reasons of having to breathe hard to enjoy life, was slow. Two and a half books in fifteen years, the half a paperback of undistinguished verse. My limp is symbolic, he thought. His leg had been injured in a bicycle accident as a youth, though with the built-up shoe the limp was less noticeable than when he hobbled around barefoot. He limped for his lacks. Fogel, for instance, regretted never having married, blaming this on his devotion to work. It’s not that it has to be one or the other, but for me it’s one or none. He was, mildly, a monomaniac. That simplified life but reduced it—what else? Still, he did not pity himself. It amused Fogel rather than not that the protagonists of his two published novels were married men with families, their wounds deriving from sources other than hurt members and primal loneliness. Imagination saves me, he thought.
Both his novels had received praise, though not much else; and Fogel had for the past six years labored on a third, about half completed. Since he declined to write reviews, lecture, or teach regularly, he ran into money problems. Fortunately he had from his father a small inheritance that came to five thousand annually, a shrinking sum in an inflated world; so Fogel reluctantly accepted summer-school invitations, or taught, somewhat on the prickly side, at writers’ conferences, one or two a summer. With what he had he made do.
It was at one of these conferences in Buffalo, in June, and at another in mid-August of the same summer, on the campus of a small college in the White Mountains, that the writer had met, and later renewed a friendship with, Gary Simson, then less than half Fogel’s age; a friendship of sorts, mild, fallible, but for a while satisfying; that is to say, possessing some of the attributes and possibilities of friendship.
Gary, a slight glaze in his eyes as he listened to Fogel talk about writing, wanted, he seriously confessed with a worried brow, “more than anything,” even “desperately,” to be a writer—the desperation inciting goose bumps on Fogel’s flesh, putting him off for a full fifteen minutes. He sat in depressed silence in his office as the youth fidgeted. “What’s the rush?” the writer ultimately asked. “I’ve got to get there,” the youth replied. “Get where?” “I want to be a good writer someday, Mr. Fogel.” “It’s a long haul, my boy,” Eli Fogel said. “Make a friend of time. And steer clear of desperation. Desperate people tend to be bad writers, increasing desperation.” He laughed a little, not unkindly. Gary sat nodding as though he had learned the lesson of his life. He was twenty-two, a curly-haired senior in college, with a broad fleshy face and frame. On his appearance at the Buffalo conference he wore a full reddish mustache drooping down the sides of his thick-lipped mouth. He shaved it off on meeting Fogel and then grew it again later in the summer. He was six feet tall and his height and breadth made him look older than he was, if not wiser. For a while after his talk with Fogel he pretended to be more casual about his work, one who skirted excess and got it right. He pretended to be Fogel a bit, amusing Fogel. He had never had a disciple before and felt affection for the boy. Gary livened things up for the writer. One could see him in the distance, coming with his yellow guitar. He strummed without distinction but sang fairly well, a tenor aspiring, related to art. “Sing me ‘Ochi Chornye,’ Gary,” Fogel said, and the youth obliged as the older man became pleasantly melancholic, thinking what if he’d had a son. Touch a hand to a guitar and Fogel had a wet eye. And Gary offered services as well as devoted attention: got books Fogel needed from the library; drove him into town when he had errands to do; could be depended on to retrieve forgotten lecture notes in his room—as if it were in compensation, though Fogel required none, for the privilege of sitting at his feet and plying him with questions about the art of fiction. Fogel, touched by his amiability, all he had yet to learn, by his own knowledge of the sadnesses of a writer’s life, invited him, usually with one or another of his friends, to his room for a drink before dinner. Gary brought along a thick notebook to jot down Fogel’s table talk. He showed him the first sentence he had copied down: “Imagination is not necessarily Id,” causing the writer when he read it to laugh uncomfortably. Gary laughed too. Fogel thought the note taking silly but didn’t object when Gary scribbled down long passages, although he doubted he had wisdom of any serious sort to offer. He was wiser in his work—one would be who revised often eno
ugh. He wished Gary would go to his books for answers to some of the questions he asked and stop treating poor Fogel like a guru.
“You can’t dissect a writer to learn what writing is or entails. One learns from experience, or should. I can’t teach anyone to be a writer, Gary—I’ve said that in my lectures. All I do here is talk about some things I’ve learned and hope somebody talented is listening. I always regret coming to these conferences.”
“You can give insights, can’t you?”
“Insights you can get from your mother.”
“More specifically, if I might ask, what do you think of my writing thus far, sir?”
Fogel reflected. “Promise you have—that’s all I can say now, but keep working.”
“What should I work most for?”
“Search possibility in and out and beyond the fact. I have the impression when I read your stories—the two in Buffalo and the one you’ve given me here—that you remember or research too much. Memory is an ingredient, Gary, not the whole stew; and don’t make the error some do of living life as though it were a future fiction. Invent, my boy.”
“I’ll certainly try, Mr. Fogel.” He seemed worried.
Fogel lectured four mornings a week at eight-thirty so he could spend the rest of the day at work. His large bright room in a guest house close to a pine grove, whose fragrance he breathed as he wrote on a cracked table by a curtained window, was comfortable even on hot afternoons. He worked every day, half day on Sundays, quitting as a rule around four; then soaked in a smallish stained tub, dressed leisurely, whistling through his teeth, in a white flannel suit fifteen years in service, and waited, holding a book before his nose, for someone to come for a drink. During the last week of the White Mountain conference he saw Gary each night. Sometimes they drove to a movie in town, or walked after supper along a path by a stream, the youth stopping to jot down in his notebook sentences given off by Fogel, chaff as well as grain. They went on until the mosquitoes thickened or Fogel’s limp began to limp. He wore a Panama hat, slightly yellowed, and white shoes he whitened daily, one with a higher heel than the other. Fogel’s pouched dark eyes, even as he spoke animatedly, were contemplative, and he listened with care to Gary though he didn’t always hear. In the last year or two he had lost weight and his white suit hung on his shoulders. He looked small by Gary’s side, although he was shorter by only three inches. And once the youth, in a burst of vitality or affection, his one imaginative act of the summer, lifted Fogel at the hips and held him breathless in the air. The writer gazed into Gary’s gold-flecked eyes; that he found them doorless to the self filled him with remorse.
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