The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel

by Daniel Stern

  They were finished with dinner when she entered the dining room. Seeing them all there before her, her eyes traveling swiftly from one to the other, she threw a hand to her mouth with a little semi-hysterical laugh, thinking, They’re all like Eddie. They think I love them, too. Only they wouldn’t cry, because they wouldn’t believe me if I told them I don’t. Uncle Alec is right: I’ve got to find my own kind.

  Alec was fiddling with the radio and Max was pouring drinks when the doorbell rang. To avoid explaining her tears to the gathering en masse, Elly ran to answer it. Cousin Charlotte, Harry and Sarah’s daughter, had arrived, too late for dinner. “Hi,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  Elly looked at her tall bony-faced cousin and, as if Alec had enabled her to make judgments, had given her a standard of measurements which she had really always possessed but had been unable heretofore to phrase clearly enough, she thought, Not my kind.

  Sarah, over Rose’s protests, took Charlotte into the kitchen for a cold dish, refusing to let Rose cook again. Max finished pouring the drinks. Holding a cigar in one hand and his drink in the other, Harry said, “Let’s drink to the new factory and more and more factories all over the Middle West.”

  “Please, Harry. One at a time. You’re not drinking, Alec boy,” Max said.

  “I just had one, thanks.”

  “But this is a toast.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to drink to the new factory,” Harry interpolated.

  Rose was staring at Alec, and Elly saw this with a growing fear. She knew the look—the preface to a thousand scenes. She felt her stomach crinkle with nausea.

  “What’s the matter?” Rose said, her voice already a little shrill. “You’re afraid Max is risking his money? You’re afraid your checks won’t come on time, or maybe stop altogether?” In the ensuing silence the waltz being played on the radio seemed thunderous.

  “Rose!” Max said.

  “Why else would he act so smart about Harry lending you the money and the bank loan and everything? He has nothing except what you send him.” She was almost shouting now.

  Harry spoke: “I didn’t mean anything like that, Alec.”

  “I know,” Alec said.

  “You know.” Rose stood closer to him. “Then why do you try to spoil the best thing that’s happened to us in years? Why? Why?”

  “Stop it, Rose,” Max said, at the same instant as Elly called, “Mother!” Charlotte and Sarah appeared in the doorway looking startled at the shouting.

  “I’m sorry if I haven’t been properly enthusiastic. I worry about Max, that’s all.”

  “You liar!” The entire room was terrorized now. Rose and the force of her hysteria were the ruling deities. “You worry about yourself.”

  Elly’s throat was so taut it was painful. She couldn’t speak, as much as she desired to.

  Alec walked with long strides out of the room and into the foyer where his bags were placed under the hall table.

  Elly flew after him. She clung tightly to him and pressed her cheek to his rough, pockmarked skin. “Don’t listen to her,” she half cried. “Don’t go away!”

  “Shh,” he said. “Don’t worry, baby. It’s nothing. And I have to go anyway. I’ve got to catch a plane for New York tonight. Look, it was worth it coming here, just to see you.” His voice was rougher and more raucous than ever. “Look,” he said, “would you go to your dad’s room and get two shirts on top of the dresser for me?”

  “All right,” she said and ran.

  Max came to Alec, walking slowly. He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “What can I do?” he said softly. “I have to live with her. We have a life. Don’t be hurt.”

  “All right, Max.”

  Elly stepped into her room, carrying Alec’s shirts. She snatched up her journal as if afraid to give herself a chance to realize what she was doing and stuck it between the two shirts. Her father was embracing his brother in the hallway.

  “I wouldn’t wait for Harry to come out and say good-by,” Max said.

  Charlotte was hovering around the entrance to the dining room, apparently unable to make up her mind where she wanted to be. “Come here,” her mother whispered, and she disappeared into the dining room.

  “Here you are, Uncle Alec.” Elly extended the shirts to him.

  He tucked them neatly into the Gladstone bag and closed it. “Good-by, Elly. Good-by, Max.”

  Elly kissed his cheek and whispered, “She’s not our kind.”

  She’s learning her lesson well, Alec thought. “That’s right, baby,” he said. “Good-by.”

  “We forgiven, Alec?”

  “Sure, Max, sure. I’ll write.

  When the door slammed there was an audible exhalation of breath in the dining room. Max stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and said, “Oh, my God! Run after Uncle Alec, Elly, and give him this.” He thrust a folded check into her hand. She ran out and down the steps.

  Alec was pausing to light a cigarette when she reached him. She handed it to him silently. “Thanks,” he said and put it in his wallet without unfolding it.

  “I … I put something in your shirts for you to read. It’s no mistake. I guess I sort of had you in mind or somebody like you when I wrote it.”

  “Thanks, baby. I’ll write you. You run back now.”

  She turned, feeling as if her eyes were brimming, yet knowing they were quite dry. Walking down the block to the house she had the odd sensation that her eyes were a frame and everything she saw was a picture that was destroyed as soon as her eyes moved on. That’s what life is, she thought, a series of pictures so fragile that you had only to look away from them one moment and they were destroyed. Alec was destroyed now because she couldn’t see him, her eyes could no longer frame his skinny body, bony hand on her face, hoarse voice in her ears saying, “Find your own kind.”

  Inside the house she stopped in the living room where they were all buzzing about what had happened and Rose was picking up soiled glasses.

  Suddenly, with revulsion, the words flowed from her throat as if she had wanted to vomit but instead shouted: “Why do you have to destroy everything I love? Why?” She ran to her room and slammed the door hard. Then she put the Brahms Fourth Symphony on the phonograph and turned it up to the maximum volume. The roar was enormous in her ears. She lay down on the bed, the tears finally coming, to wait for her name to be shouted and for the inevitable knock on her door.

  The world is like a great big rock in the ocean and we’re all hanging on, Uncle Alec had said. The minute you’re cruel to people it’s like pushing them off into the ocean. She wanted to get up and write it in her journal, and then realized that she had none. God, she thought, that was kid stuff! Find your own kind!

  The bed was like a rock and the rich, roaring texture of the Brahms was the ocean, and she felt the bed turning and turning, but she was holding on until suddenly there was no ocean of sound, and the bed had stopped turning and her mother was standing at the side of the bed.

  “Elly!” her mother said. “Elly!”

  PART TWO

  WE LIVE IN MUSEUMS, Elly thought. Walking up the street to school each morning, I still pass the grocery store on Ninth Street (she always thought of it as the “poor” street) where I used to shop for my mother. I was a nervous kid in those days, impatient at waiting while the fat, loudmouthed women elbowed and talked their way in to be waited on ahead of me.

  She turned west on Colchester Drive, the street that would ultimately lead her, through the museum of the last two years, to the cliff road and on to the new house.

  We live in museums, Elly thought, excitedly now, as if this fact, like so many others, were now a thing of the past, her long brown legs driving her away from the past toward the new house. Anytime I walk a few blocks west, she thought, I pass the red stone building where I took my first piano lessons from Mr. Larkin, and, later on, my first dancing class. Everywhere I pass relics, fossils of last year, last month. No matter how I grow and change, nothing affects this mu
seum in which I live.

  I still pass women—“Good afternoon, Mrs. Stone”—who knew me as a little girl. In spite of the fact that I’m seventeen and Mother worries about the size of my breasts (she remembered the feel of Jerry Wilson’s hands on them, warm and pressing hard), they still nod to me, say good morning, ask after my mother, as they did when we used to visit Uncle Harry, when I was six, eight, eleven. These ladies don’t change, and won’t let me change. They’re statues, and the grocery store and music school are the exhibits in this perpetual, goddamned museum in which I live. Always museums. Two years ago they’d left the Indianapolis museum for the Colchester museum. Always new exhibits.

  It was an early-April afternoon and the sunlight was still bright, if not too warm, as Elly passed the few houses that marked the end of Colchester. She began to run a little, in exuberance, the print, peasant skirt she wore flaring out like a flower. Her tanned face—hazel eyes set wide apart in their open stare of innocence, little straight nose, full, pale lips all framed by a sweep of ash-blond hair reaching around her cheeks and to her shoulders—was eager, not quite sure of the expected happiness (so many expectations of happiness, it seemed to her, ended in disappointment that she was enormously surprised whenever a hope, however slight, was fulfilled) but satisfied with excitement if happiness failed. After all, excitement was tangible—the quickened breath, the tension in the stomach and the legs, the bitten lip. Happiness, she thought, must be the remembrance of excitement. But that was sad.

  Never mind, she thought, slowing down, out of breath, everything is going to be different in the new house. The steady stitch of crickets was everywhere. She was hot and perspired, the sweat forming under the dark-yellow hair above her cheeks, a few drops falling sideways into the wells of her ears. Tossing her head she wondered if this was peculiar to her. She sort of liked the feel of it, but couldn’t bring herself to believe that other people perspired into their ears too. She’d meant to ask Roz about that. In fact she’d planned on mentioning it the other evening at the choral concert at the high school.

  Three nights before, she had been bubbling over in anticipation of the new house. Uncle Harry had been to dinner with his daughter Charlotte, and the entire Kaufman family—Elly, Max and Rose—had been intent on describing as fully as possible the fantastically wonderful house John Marron Lang was building for them. Actually the house was completed already, but Lang was such a meticulous craftsman he was now selecting the furnishings and planning their arrangement.

  Although Rose Kaufman was perhaps a little more composed than her husband or daughter (composure was very important to her and in this she felt Elly terribly lacking), she was as anxious as they were to impress Harry with the magnitude of what was happening to her family: her husband at last a success, herself finally able to hold her head up with the best of anyone in town.

  Harry and Charlotte were snowed under. Max described the spaciousness of the rooms; Elly spoke of the formal gardens and of how the house seemed to grow out of the cliff, as if Lang had endowed the stone with the ability to bear life, and of how it looked from a distance with the sun striking it, winking and shining with diamond brightness. Rose spoke of the lovely blond furniture and the Swedish chandelier, a strip of metal suspending from the ceiling an inverted metal bowl in which were drilled holes and from which streams of light were directed at individual sections of the living room. She spoke of this with an emphatic pride bolstered by the nagging feeling that they had gone too far. It was all a little extreme for her, a tremendous change from the gingerbread with which her apartments had always been furnished.

  But they had engaged Lang as a salute to their new-found prosperity. A Lang house set one apart from any other home owner in the country. Rose had not, however, anticipated that Lang would be quite so strong-willed. It was, to him, his house, the Kaufmans merely paying the cost.

  They spoke of many things about the house but most of all they repeated, like a ritual for a miracle, that it was a glass house.

  “The walls are all windows,” Max told his brother in amazement. “Windows. No walls, just glass.”

  “Eat up, Harry,” Rose said. “There’s more chicken.”

  Harry Kaufman wiped his thick lips and heavy chin with the cloth napkin and said, “No thanks, Rose. I’m full. So what do you have, drapes to cover the glass?”

  “Yes,” Elly interrupted, “big green drapes.”

  “Draperies,” her mother corrected.

  “Big green draperies, thick, and they’ll bunch up when you pull a string,” Elly continued.

  “Twenty acres I have, Harry,” Max Kaufman said, like a voice from the past, poor Max the younger brother telling Harry the first-born of the family, the Indianapolis lawyer, with his home in Colchester: “Someday I’ll have a house on a hill, Harry, with twenty acres to go with it.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Harry said. Turning to his daughter, he asked, “Isn’t that wonderful, Charlotte?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte replied. She was a plain-looking girl who was a little frightened of Elly. “I’ve seen the house,” she said.

  Elly flared instantly. “When did you see it? It’s not ready yet. You have no right to.”

  “It’s very lovely,” Charlotte said, trying to ignore her cousin.

  Elly’s mother frowned. “What’s the matter with you, Elly?”

  “I just don’t think anyone but us should see it until it’s all finished,” Elly said, retreating. She really meant “me” rather than “us.” She had taken complete possession of the house. Elly pushed back her chair and stood up.

  “Where are you going already?” her mother complained. “Have some milk.”

  “I haven’t time. I’m meeting Roz Keller. We’re going to the concert at school.”

  “But first have some milk.”

  While the altercation went on, Harry observed his seventeen-year-old niece as she stood, feet spread apart, dressed in one of the wide skirts she always wore, and a red sweater, brilliant against the sensual paleness of her face. It was remarkable. She was at the same time a woman (at seventeen) and incredibly young. And so beautiful! She was tall and full-breasted. Her skin was light, but it burned so easily that she already had a tan cast from the few sunny spring days they had had. Harry caught himself for an instant thinking of her as a woman. To cover his embarrassment he suggested that Charlotte accompany her cousin to the concert.

  “Oh, I can’t take anyone, Uncle Harry,” Elly said. “Roz and I are double-dating.” And she was gone with a splash of good-bys, and a fast kiss for father and uncle. She was sorry for having lied, but she didn’t like Charlotte, and they were doing the B-Minor Mass. You couldn’t, she felt, listen to the B-Minor Mass, the score of which was tucked into her coat pocket, with someone you didn’t like a great deal. Roz and she understood each other.

  Roz Keller, a thin, nervous girl with bangs, was waiting for her in front of the school. There was a hushed feeling about the audience. A guest conductor from New York, of great reputation, was to conduct the chorus: Cowley, the name on all the choral records in the homes of anyone in Colchester who possessed such records.

  It was a fairly large audience, and as they waited Elly whispered, “You know, when they come from New York to play for us here I always feel that we’re inland people and they come from the sea.”

  Roz nodded and said, “Mmm.”

  Sometimes Elly wondered whether Roz was shamming an understanding of what she was saying.

  Cowley entered the stage from the wings, a tall, skinny man with an intense smile on his bony face. Elly was fascinated by the rawness of his face and neck; they seemed thin and exposed, vulnerable. He limped, she noticed, and her gaze traveled down to his feet. On one foot he wore an outsize slipper, on the other a shoe.

  Elly felt the tears begin to sting the back of her eyes and, rising swiftly, she ran from the hall as Cowley raised his hands and drew the first rich Kyrie from the choir.

  Roz followed and found her behind
the stairs, sobbing a little still. “For crissake what’s the matter, Elly, you sick?”

  “Roz, he’s crippled! A man like that—crippled!”

  “Oh, Elly, I swear. What’s the matter with you? Cowley isn’t crippled—I don’t think. Maybe he hurt his foot. Take it easy. Now come on back. Did you leave your score inside? Come on.”

  That was when Elly had wanted to ask, as she streaked a few tear marks across her soft cheek, Am I different from people, Roz? Didn’t you want to cry when you saw a man like that limp out on the stage? When you perspire, does the sweat run into your ears? Am I like you? Can you play the piano? Can you learn how to dance at your dancing lessons?

  Now, with the town well behind her, she thought, Am I the only one who hides from piano lessons because I love music so much that I can’t play, but mother won’t take no for an answer?

  Perhaps now with the new house and all everything would be different. She must not enter the new house, the glass house, with the specter of those awful piano lessons hanging over her head. Oh, for God’s sake! What does Mom want from me?

  She glanced at the little watch that encircled her wrist. It was three o’clock. Right now she should be entering Mr. Larkin’s living room and sitting down at the piano. Oh, she wanted to play, but she got all tied up and tight with the desire and then suddenly she didn’t want to play at all. She wanted to get up and run out of the room, to tell her mother, “I’ll never go back there. I can’t play, I won’t play.” But then Mother would say, “Daddy may not think you can play, but I know you can, Elly, dear. And you want me to be proud of you whatever your father may say. Please, Elly,” she’d say. “Please.” With a thinned mouth set tightly. “Please, Elly. I know you’re a brilliant girl. You can do anything you want to do.”