by Daniel Stern
“Yes, but, Mother, there’s nothing in all the wide world to want to do.”
Max Kaufman would say to his wife, “As soon as she fails a little bit at something she tries, she gets discouraged. Bad marks at school. I don’t know. Let’s leave her alone.”
“She takes after you,” Rose Kaufman replied. “She’s stubborn. She seems to love music, but she won’t set herself to the piano.”
“So leave her alone.”
In the middle of the field she was crossing there was a little hint of a stream, almost completely choked with mud and small stones. Elly threw herself down beside it and shielded her eyes from the sun. The sweet grass smell and the sticky sounds of birds enveloped her. To go, she thought. Like Cowley went after the concert, or the next day, or whenever. Or like Lang would go when the house was finished, the job done, the concrete goal attained.
The brightness of the sun seemed to tell her, as if it were only a reflection of the brilliance she had seen in the glass walls of the new house the first time she had set eyes on it, that everything would be different now that they were to live in the new house. At the same time, she felt the fear that nothing would change. She must shake off the old life, the daily terror of unfulfillment.
She was glad that her father had a great deal of money now. All the years in the old building in Indianapolis and then the years in the new building in the oldest, most inexpensive section of Colchester there had always been held out to her the hope: we’ll get out of here.
Now, it had developed, they were “going to get out of here.” But nowhere out into the mythical world of which Elly dreamed. They were to have the house built for them outside the town, on the great hill, with sloping gardens and twenty acres of their own behind the house. Instead of out to the world, they were to have their own world.
At first the idea was intolerable to Elly. She felt betrayed. Looking over her father’s shoulder as he inspected the blueprints, she was confused and hopeless. Then, as she described where they were going to live to her friends, Roz and Jerry Wilson, it began to take on, because of how seclusive it sounded when verbalized, a sort of magical quality. One night she woke from a sound sleep and sitting up, still dazed, on the surface of a half sleep, heard herself say over and over again, “The girl on the hill, the girl on the hill.” It was then she was aware of, and would always think of, that time as the shutting and the opening of the first door. She did not know what the promise “we’ll get out of here” had meant concretely to her. What was important was that whatever it was she desired to be rescued from, she knew now she could no longer look to Mother and Father for help. And so she had, during the eight months of the planning of the house, submerged these feelings in favor of a steadily growing anticipation of life on the hill. It was doubly pleasant for her at this time, as her mother was too absorbed in altercations with her father to notice such things as how long she practiced at the piano.
Kaufman’s first architect proposed a reasonable price, Kaufman felt, for a fine, workmanlike house.
Rose Kaufman exploded. “All right, I’ll kill myself. I won’t have any more troubles. This is no life, with a husband who has one daughter and who buys all that expensive land and then builds a house like a bungalow.”
“What’s the matter with these plans? What do you want, a castle with a moat we should have to swim across to go in and out? Feldman is a good architect and the price isn’t too much.”
“You know we talked about John Marron Lang.”
“Lang from New York? That was just talk, I should hope.”
“I’ll get pictures of Lang houses. I’ll show you. You build a Lang house and they take pictures and publish them.”
“We’re going to live in a house, not a book.”
She brought pictures. She talked. She persuaded Elly to plump for the Lang house. Elly saw the pictures in the big book that Lang himself had designed. The vision was hers almost immediately. At first it was the girl on the hill that she was to be. Now superimposed on her profound hopelessness of contact with the outside world was the dream of a magnificent isolation. To look out on the world from within a glass house would be to open limitless hope. She begged her father to have Lang do the house.
One day, on her way into the dining room for dinner, she encountered her mother leaving the room, her eyes red-rimmed, her heavy face twisted by a grimace which was an attempt at control.
“Where are you going, Mom?”
“Nowhere.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“No. Go inside. Everything’s on the table.”
“Oh, come on in, Mom.”
But Rose was not to be persuaded to have dinner or breakfast or lunch the next day. By dinnertime Max relented. He called Lang that night, while Elly and her mother toyed with their coffee cups on the kitchen table and tried to listen. “A hunger strike I had on my hands here. As if it was a movie, not a serious thing like a house. I’ll meet you at the train, Mr. Lang. Wire me when you’ll arrive.”
On hearing this, Elly threw her arms around her mother and hugged her. Rose held her off at arm’s length and said, “I hope you realize the sacrifice your father is making for you. Don’t forget life is obligations. Remember them.”
Elly’s outburst of affection curdled to a sour taste under her tongue. As she walked through the apartment it occurred to her that if any sacrifice was being made by her father, it was at least as much on her mother’s behalf as on hers. The expectation no longer pulsed and paced her breathing. She floated through the house like a ghost, past all the drab curtains on the windows, the depressing faded-brown chairs with their tiresome curved wooden legs, the red-velvet scarves which seemed to be over every bureau and bookcase. The rooms were of the past, not for now.
At any rate, the new life was on its way irrevocably. Elly’s first sight of Lang revived the delight. She stood with a group of friends across the street from their apartment house and, trying to maintain an air of indifference while the others nudged one another and commented, watched her father help Lang with his bags.
John Marron Lang was a powerful man of about six feet three inches in height, topped with a great splash of white hair. Elly noticed immediately his hands, big and encrusted with calluses but with short stubby fingers. There was nothing delicate about him, Elly thought, except the pictures she had seen of his houses. They were an incongruous combination of rock-strength and flights-of-glass transparency.
“Elly,” her father called, catching sight of her in the group, “give me a hand here, will you?”
She ran across the street and practically fell at Lang’s feet. The architect handed her a small box like a doctor’s bag, which contained drafting tools, and said “How do you do, Miss Kaufman” in a voice that was almost inaudible. Elly thought, Why, he’s shy, and went into the house.
At the dinner table her intuition was borne out. John Marron Lang was a shy man who ate his food for the most part in silence and said once with a half-smile, “I don’t often stay at a client’s home while working on a new house for them, but I want to keep a close watch on this one.”
There was nothing more forthcoming from Mr. Lang until the dessert course, an aspic, lay a quivering ruin in its serving dish. Lang had heretofore addressed all his remarks to either Mr. or Mrs. Kaufman. Suddenly, without any provocation except her wide-eyed stare, he turned to Elly and said, “I noticed your scores on the piano. You seem to favor Bach.”
Elly was so startled that she could think of nothing to say. She merely nodded, and was grateful afterward that she had been silent as Lang went on to speak of music and architecture and the relationship between the two. The Kaufmans listened, vaguely aware that this was something they should hear, while Elly was lost in Lang’s world of rhythmic forms and liberated stone. He stopped as suddenly as he had begun, as if satisfied that he had established contact with the young girl, and began to speak of functional furniture to Mrs. Kaufman, who revived visibly, paying lip service to the preceding remarks by sayi
ng, “Elly is a very talented pianist,” at which Elly curled even further into herself, hugging with her the memory of Lang’s attention even more than the meaning of what he had been saying.
“How lovely!” Lang said, clasping and unclasping his large hands on the white tablecloth. “Perhaps she’ll play something for us later.”
Elly scraped her chair back a little as if beginning to go. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to play the piano for Lang. She had been systematically avoiding her piano lessons with Mr. Larkin, praying that the deception would not reach her mother. She could never tell her mother and father how much she would love to play and yet how certain she was that she never would.
Her mother beamed, but Lang seemed to sense her discomfort and guided the conversation away from music and Elly back to the house. Elly liked him instantly. There was about him an alien quality, here in her home—the big Anglo-Saxon face and the white hair, among the dark-skinned, brown-haired Kaufmans. She thought somehow that he might appear quite as divorced from his environment wherever it was he came from, that he was like her, the eternally unassimilated, devoted to some life or dream within himself. In his case she assumed it was his work. For herself she had no idea what it was; she was only intensely aware of its existence.
In this she was correct. Lang, like Elly, was always an ambassador in a foreign land; all communication with those about him was as if in the form of communiques and notes to strangers until he could meet the countryman, the person whose manner or speech declared, like unfamiliar dress or a foreign accent: I’m a stranger here myself, and a real communication might begin.
They finished their coffee and Lang was shown his room. Knowing the danger of having to perform was past, Elly breathed easier. It was so good to have a stranger in the house. If she never spoke to him or he to her, he was an unwitting ally in the endless struggle with her family.
Later that night Rose Kaufman, as she lay in her bed separated from her husband’s bed by a night table topped with a lamp, found herself unable to sleep. She shifted her heavy body, feeling the perspiration under the armpits and beneath her breasts where the night’s warmth lay heaviest.
How is it, she wondered, that I’m still at war with Max, in spite of the money they’d both wanted so much all these years? Now that he had it, she hated him for it. It was no longer her home, where she had to pinch, save and organize to keep it going, but his home, where the scratching of the pen on the checkbook solved everything.
Well, this new home would be hers. She had forced it out of Max. It terrified her a little when she realized what an extreme kind of home it was going to be—so modern. But she had insisted and got her demand. That was what counted. All the years of scrimping and iron control of life (because if you let go one instant only, it would drown you) had left her with this: victory was the realization that war was endless. When the world surrendered, you turned to your family for the next battle. It wasn’t good, but what could she do? The real struggle with Elly would begin now. The girl must be given a sense of her own value, of dignity. She was clearly too attractive to men.
Her thoughts floated off into a horrified fantasy of Elly being kissed and people watching. She pressed her hand over her eyes and destroyed the image in a blur of shifting colors and tried to relax enough to fall asleep. Beside her Max had fallen asleep, suffused with a deep feeling of well-being, troubled for only a moment before the darkness became thick and opaque by the thought that Rose was being far too smug about Lang. Well, she wasn’t paying him. The disturbing idea faded into sleep.
Her cheek hot and flushed against the cool pillow, Elly was remembering the way Lang had clasped and unclasped his hands and the strength that had been implied in the movement. This was the man who was to create her new home. She stifled a giggle, remembering how close she came to having to play the piano for him. How ridiculous! But of course her parents couldn’t know the kinship she felt with him. Nor, for that matter, could Lang. They might as well have forced her to build something for him with a set of colored blocks.
She stretched her long, slender brown legs to the end of the bed and threw her arms over her head, cracking her elbow joints deliciously, wondering for a second if she was still growing. The thought was marked as silly and dismissed. Then almost at the same time, but close enough to create an ambiguity as to which occurred first, she saw Lang’s strong, bone-ridged face, saw again the clenching movement of his great hands and felt, beginning first at the insides of her thighs, then spreading to her stomach and finally bathing her breast, a languor and a sensuousness that made her shut her eyes and hold them tightly closed. Then the visions began—Lang resting his face on her breast, and then the hands, big enough for each one to encompass a breast, opening her blouse …
Her hand (she was trying not to, but with no great effort—resistance was a token to the idea of her mother) was at the inside of her thigh, the other one loosening the trousers of her pajamas. This was how beautiful it could be to be really alone and yet not to be alone. The hand on her flesh was not the hand undoing her clothes. She was so many people now—herself, Lang, Jerry Wilson and his fumbling in the car after the dance. Although she was told so often, only now did she know she was beautiful. This was how it would feel if Lang were really there rather than existing only on the surface of her closed eyelids.
She trembled and lay still, submerged in a wash of feeling. Life is real, she thought. I’m truly alive (as sometimes she might doubt, perhaps at two in the afternoon with the bright sun everywhere, darkening, by comparison, herself and her existence); anything is alive that is wet with life, unsatisfied. Still breathing a little heavily she slept, and soon after, sleep measured her breath, less prodigal of her energy than she herself was.
The way she was staring at me! John Lang was thinking as he drew a deep lungful of smoke from his cigarette, careful to drop none of the ashes on the green-striped pajamas his wife, Lorraine, had chosen for him against his will. Especially when I said that, it was as if she could see right through me and the lie as well. As if she were repeating to herself mockings—(I don’t often stay at a client’s home while working)—as if she had heard Lorraine and himself arguing, endlessly fighting, until finally she came out with it. Unsatisfied, I’m unsatisfied, stabbing him instantly with guilt, for what can make one more guilty than being called on in a deep need, sexual or otherwise, and failing.
It was as if this girl-woman with her steady gaze were accusing him too (after Lorraine, would all women accuse him silently?), saying, “A great big man like you. Look at the size of you, and your wife’s unsatisfied. You never stay at a client’s home while still working on plans, but after the endless turmoil at home the call from this Kaufman in a little town outside Indianapolis comes and you run to pack your bags to get away from the accusations for as long as you can.” He knew he would have to explain this sudden flight to the analyst Lorraine had procured for him three months ago.
But it was, of course, ridiculous about this Elly Kaufman and her steady stare. It could have been everything from wide-eyed admiration (if she had heard of him. Lorraine insisted that he made too much of his reputation. His success had been slow and steady, unlike that of some of the other men he knew, but his prices were higher than those demanded by many more famous men) or it could have been just a great interest in what he had been saying. What would a girl like that know about sexual inadequacy? It was his wife’s term; in encasing his problem in her words and voice he was able to remove himself, for a while at least, from the anguish implicit in any thinking of it.
He was sitting in an upholstered chair placed near the window covered with an awful flower pattern that made him wonder just how much he was going to have to contend with when he furnished the house. He wondered how old the girl could be; she was contradictory in every way—a girl-woman, and her beauty was fragile-robust. She must be about nineteen, he figured, and she didn’t know a damn thing about him, but just the same when he remembered her star
e he felt a little shiver in the groin. I must be getting old, he thought; only the old think about very young girls. He stood up, flipped the glowing tip of his cigarette off the end of the butt and out of the window, and dropped the stub into an ash tray. He looked at his hand and thought, I’ve got to stop that clenching of the hands. Maybe that’s what she was staring at. He slipped under the sheets and thought, Well, tomorrow I’ll work.
And he did work, hard, thinking of nothing but the house—not of Lorraine, nor the girl, but only of this house that was to be his best. Elly was away at school most of the time he was at the apartment, and in the late afternoon and early evenings, especially after construction was begun, he was out at the house checking on the day’s work.
It was made pleasant for him at the Kaufmans’. He had even been invited to the wedding of one of Mrs. Kaufman’s nephews. Lang had been raised a Methodist, a faith with which he had no great sympathy any more. This was his first extended contact with a Jewish family in the Midwest. He had known several in New York and he was surprised at how little difference there was between them and the Kaufmans. There seemed to be little, if any, regional effect. He was glad he had come, and if Lorraine’s letters sounded a trifle petulant, this made him gladder still to be here.
Once, when the house was nearly completed, he thought of the girl, remembering how he had characterized her as a girl-woman and her loveliness as fragile-robust. It seemed to him that evening that the house, springing as it did from the actual earth near the summit of the hill, was like that. The great panes of glass, glistening with a crystal upward flight, had a youngness. The earth in which the foundations were imbedded, of course, had its own age: girl-woman; the same qualities made for a delicate strength. He thought of telling her how he had thought about it, but for some reason did not….
As the house progressed and grew, Lang ate and slept better and better. The trouble with Lorraine seemed more and more unreal. When he worked, he was as good a man as anyone. Staying with the Kaufmans, he felt, was the smartest thing he had ever done.
