by Daniel Stern
Her mother knew about her lies to Mr. Larkin. Perhaps she knew about John Lang too. That was impossible. Perhaps if she told them Mr. Larkin tried to make love to her … But that would raise such a horrible stink…. But then she wouldn’t have to play any more…. And in the new house they would probably have him come and give her the lessons there…. She couldn’t face all those people at the table. And John Lang, what would he think after that scene at the table? Like a baby—she’d been treated like a child.
She waited for a long time but no one came. Not her penitent mother nor her superior cousin Charlotte nor her rather helpless father. After a while she opened the door and went out. Quite a few people had left. She had no idea how long she’d been in the bathroom. Her mother was talking to the bride’s mother. Her father was dancing with a woman she did not know. Lang was nowhere to be seen. In a rustle of pink taffeta she sat down at her place. The tablecloth before her was grease-spotted and full of crumbs. Waiters were busily rattling dishes on their metal carts. The whole room looked tired, pleasantly wilted. Women were lining up at the checkroom getting hats and wraps.
Elly was alone at the table for a few minutes until Max Kaufman, seeing she had returned, excused himself and joined her. Before he could speak she said, “Why does she do it, Dad, why?”
“I’m afraid the doing isn’t all on her side.”
“But she didn’t have to—here.”
“No, you’re right there. I’m sorry about that. She had no right. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Oh, yes, Mr. Lang left earlier. He went home to pack. He’s leaving tomorrow morning. He’s really done a job—saw the house through from plans to the final stick of furniture. Worth every cent.”
He must have found out I was only seventeen, and got scared, Elly thought.
“It’s a wonderful home,” she said.
“It was nice of him to stay for the wedding and meet the family and all. He said if he doesn’t see you in the morning before he goes for me to say good-by for him.”
She smiled. “I guess he was pretty embarrassed by the goings-on.”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “We’re all going out to the house later to show the family, Aunt Martha and Frank and all of them. The furniture’s all set up now. Will you come along?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Here comes your mother. Be nice to her.”
The night grew chillier as Kaufman drove the back way along the cliff road. Rose led the others around to the front to show them the garden before entering the house. Elly hung back. The night sky was a shifting, windy background for the darkened shape of the house. There was the light odor of lilacs and beneath that the sweet smell of pines.
Kaufman lingered behind with his daughter, wiping his round face with an already moist handkerchief.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad to see there are no mosquitoes up here anyway. Of course the lights aren’t on yet. But I hope it’s a good sign. We’ll start moving in tomorrow. I made arrangements to sell our old stuff. How’s that?”
“That’s fine, Dad.”
“What’s the matter, Elly?”
It was a question born of a great confusion, not only what was troubling her, but what was the matter with everything? This was supposed to be the beginning of the plateau, the leveling out of that hill they’d all been climbing all their lives; but to reach the flat, safe-looking land and to find that it was quicksand into which you were sinking? No, it would have been better to continue struggling with the ascent. What did his wife want from his daughter and what did his daughter want from the world?
“What do you want, Elly dear?”
She shook her head. “Nothing will ever be enough,” she said.
She’s right there if she means nothing will ever be enough for Rose. Neither of us could ever completely become what Rose wants. But you just couldn’t tell your girl that about her mother. She was too young to understand, anyway. A sadness he could not quite comprehend settled on him.
“Dad,” she said, a sudden malice gripping her and centering gradually. “Dad, Mr. Larkin …” She paused, the indicting words on her tongue. Mr. Larkin tried to make love to me, that’s why I can’t go to the lessons, that’s why I can’t play the piano. She knew her father at least would believe her and that would be enough for her purposes, but she couldn’t. The vision of Mr. Larkin’s scrawny face bending over her to turn a page of music, the pimple on the side of his face, enormous in her eyes, stopped her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do it to him. Just that the idea frightened her too much. You couldn’t do anything which made you so afraid. A wall had sprung up against her sudden hate.
“Mr. Larkin,” she said, “will he be coming to the house to give me lessons, now that we live here?”
“I don’t know, Elly. We’ll see.”
Amid a background of oohs and ahs, Rose stuck her head around the corner of the terrace and said, “Stop hiding like a pair of lovers and come on.”
She disappeared. Kaufman felt helpless. He curved a hand on her cheek and let it rest there for a moment. “Come on,” he said. “Come and see your new house.”
“I’ll be right in.”
He sighed, loudly, so that she would at least understand he was concerned about her, that if there were any sides to be taken he was on hers, and then went on to the others. Her forestalled hatred turned to Lang, at the moment probably placing neatly folded shirts side by side in his suitcase or perhaps already asleep, the clenching of his hands stilled for a time. She had never got to know him at all, never learned anything about his previous life. She could write a letter to his wife: “Dear Mrs. Lang, your husband and I—” Perhaps she would. She wasn’t afraid of that—they would be so far away. Abruptly, as ephemeral as the shifting night sky, her mood changed. Perhaps she would write a letter and perhaps not. And now they were going to stick her in Crofts College, near by, where she would drive to school each day and home each night. Other girls went away to school, why couldn’t she? But she thought this as if she were lying to someone else. She knew how different she was from others. Her hope was that they might not know it. Then she could say “Other girls do it” and get away with it. She had to get away.
She walked swiftly to the front of the house. Down the slope she ran, hair flying behind her, the night breeze chilly on her bare shoulders and back, moist with perspiration. Her eyes opened wide as she ran and she gasped more and more as she neared the bottom of the hill. Her heart was pounding and her throat choked with some nameless emotion. Her lips were dry and burned a little at the corners. As she ran she remembered Lang kissing her and, turning her head, she looked back at the house, nearly stumbling as she did so, and saw that the draperies were closed all around the walls and some of her long hair was wrapped around her cheek by the wind and she remembered how, because she had light hair and skin and her parents were dark, she played games when she was a child, that she was an orphan adopted by them, or a gypsy’s child, or a foundling.
She reached the bottom of the hill and allowed herself to fall panting on the cool grass. The black sky had cleared and was now star-ridden. She threw her hand to her mouth in an excess of passionate feeling. The sky was endless over her and if she closed her eyes it would seem that it covered her like a warm blanket.
She jumped to her feet. Against the trunk of a tall tree she leaned her hot cheek. The bark was rough and scratchy and she rubbed her face on it recalling his hand closing and opening on her shoulder. Oh, she would get out of here, she knew she would get away. She raised her arms above her head, stretched as hard as she could and uttered an ecstatic, sharp little cry.
Looking up at the top of the hill, she saw that the draperies had been withdrawn from inspection and the lights had been turned on in every room. Against the jet sky the glass house burst into glittering prisms. First lactescence, then a crystalline translucence flared on the summit of the hill like an enormous match struck on the sky, illuminating as if for the first time a world as endless as her desire.
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br /> PART THREE
FLUTTERING, FLYING, FLOATING, HER delicate body now arched like a bow ready to be sprung, now stiff, stark, her shadowed eyes only melting a look of tenderness and pity on the imaginary prostrate form round which she moved, her steps round him forming a magic circle to ward off death, to pant life in through his lips; then suddenly, tight and unyielding, she freezes; she has seen herself in an attitude of supplication. Nothing, no one is worth this; then hating herself and pitying him she half falls, half extends herself over him, guarding him. She is now perhaps a tree, a vine, anything that is wet with life, unsatisfied.
The flute permits an arm to rise slowly; the oboe floats the torso backwards; the strings free her entirely and she leaps, once, twice, three times. The basses nudge the imaginary form beneath her into movement. He stirs, turns toward her. She stops, afraid of what she has done, but he is alive now; there is no going back. She moves away from him in heavy steps as he advances. She no longer recognizes him. The tympany mutters and growls rhythmically. She has made him. They no longer have any relationship to each other. They are separate; no longer perfect.
The music stopped, the needle scraping harshly on the record. Elly lowered herself from her toes with a sigh. She touched her bosom. The leotard was wringing wet. She was exhausted. Dancing took so much out of her, but it was, in the main, what made the difference between going to school at Crofts, near home, and the excitement and fantastic froth of living that her first year at Vernon had been. Courses in every possible subject could be had anywhere, but Vernon was oriented toward the modern dance as a means of expression, adjustment and physical activity as well. Rose had been a little disturbed at first hearing of this.
“Does that mean she’ll be dancing with boys during school hours?” she had asked Max.
“No, dear,” he’d replied, “it’s not ballroom dancing. It’s … it’s supposed to be expressive. I don’t know. Something like ballet, only more so.”
“Oh, ballet. That’s nice.”
“And don’t you think she dances with boys, anyway?”
“All right, Max. All right. Lay off, please.”
The letters from home became increasingly interested in her dancing on her informing them she was to perform at the annual concert. Before that they had been concerned about her grades (which had been a little better than in high school, though not much) and with her social life (Don’t cheapen yourself, whatever you do, Elly. Remember your own value. Get a lot of sleep and don’t make friends with just anyone). Of course if her parents had had their way, Elly would be safely ensconced at home, with Max driving her to Crofts each morning and picking her up each afternoon.
Her victory had been hard won. Beginning with sulking she had proceeded to more drastic measures slowly. Gradually she began to increase the number of times she saw Jerry Wilson. The Wilsons were the poor people whom they had known for years, first in Indianapolis when Max first went into business for himself, and later in Colchester, where Wilson had moved for a job in Kaufman’s new factory.
Rose tried to stop Elly from seeing Jerry, it seemed to Max, because the Wilsons were the past, the struggling times. The Wilsons still struggled while Rose and Max Kaufman moved themselves and their daughter to the hill outside of town, to their glass house. Rose couldn’t bear the idea of Elly and Jerry. Max, on the other hand, didn’t like the family as people. Wilson had committed what was to Max the greatest possible sin: he had changed his name from Wilcowsky to the closest Anglo-Saxon equivalent. He knew their boy to be what he called a “wise guy.” The problem, however, meant much more to Rose than it did to him.
Elly let it be known that she had made up her mind to go to Vernon. She then drew quite clearly the parallel between going to Crofts and seeing Jerry Wilson or away to Vernon, out of danger. The first action Rose took was to forbid her daughter to see Jerry. Elly shrugged this maneuver off as preliminary and easily dealt with. They couldn’t watch her twenty-four hours a day and she altered her schedule accordingly, seeing him quite as often, but keeping odd hours, which aroused, in turn, further suspicion. Finally, as registration time approached and they showed no signs of cracking, Elly carefully moved into a full offensive: the locked door and refusal of food (but Rose caught Max smuggling a snack in, and refused to believe the girl was starving, thus dooming that strategy to failure). The hysterical threats of suicide were something Max, for one, could never believe, having heard the rhetorical “I’ll kill myself” from his mother and never having become an orphan, and having a wife addicted to meeting defiance of her will with “I’ll kill myself” and never having become a widower.
Finally, carefully planning it to coincide with Jerry Wilson’s trip to Chicago, Elly went (innocently enough it seemed to her hosts) to visit her cousin Charlotte and her father, Harry. The prediction of her parents’ interpretation of his disappearance proved correct. They called Mr. Wilson, who disclaimed all knowledge of Jerry and Elly running off together (a little wistfully, as the idea of a liaison between his son and Kaufman’s daughter could easily lead to a foreman’s job for him at the plant).
Finally, in a random call to Max’s brother Harry to inform him of their predicament, she was found. “I left you a note,” she lied coolly. “I can’t help it if it got lost.”
At this point Kaufman decided to take a hand for Elly. He was a little frightened by what he was certain was her lying about the note and by her fantastic determination to go away to college. The feeling of guilt, one which he was not familiar with, in regard to his family, began to creep into his consciousness. What had they done to her that she wanted to get away so terribly? At this point in his thinking, the early, empty years would return, the years during which (his wife had convinced him by now) he had been remiss as a father, attending instead to his business night and day. Flickering about the edges of this burden of responsibility was the half-admitted realization that what had happened had been just what Rose had wanted: himself away at the plant, Rose in command of Elly day and night with the added weapon of his quite necessary absence to keep him in line.
He saw now, and tried to explain to Rose that Elly seemed to be living life with them as a war, the giving and taking of land and forces in order to achieve goals. “Let her go,” he said. “She’s been too much with us. An only child. She lies, Rose. She’s too old to lie.”
“That’s just it. You can imagine how she could run wild out there.” An arm gestured to the great outside wilderness that was the world to Rose Kaufman.”
“Maybe she’ll learn self-control there. It’s a good school, with all kinds of girls.”
“Yes. All kinds. And all kinds of men too.”
“It’s a girls’ school. You’d rather have her with Jerry Wilson? You know a lot what she does with him!”
“She doesn’t do anything—except neck, I suppose.”
“I hope so.”
That did it. Rose threw herself into the shopping and preparations for Elly’s departure with as much vigor and determination as she had displayed in obstructing it. It was necessary for her to abandon all her doubts about Elly’s leaving, in order for her to participate at all. Feelings of horror at the prospect could not simply be laid aside or modified. They had to be replaced with enthusiasm, hope of some sort; otherwise she would break under the strain of the realization of her family’s actions not conforming to her desires. If her wishes could not prevail over reality, then her wishes adapted themselves completely to what was happening around her. Thus, that which occurred in spite of her was felt to have happened because of her. She became quite moral about parents who “hugged their children to death.”
Only at night did she sometimes awaken and, smoking a cigarette while Max slept soundly, wonder at the emptiness that seemed to wait for her until Elly would return, wonder if they ever did return, once having left, and sensing the beginning of tears in the corners of each eye, impatiently wipe them away. Looking through the door of the bedroom which stood ajar and seeing the large ex
panse of the living room, a small stretch of the glass wall peeping through the partially drawn draperies, she thought, Who needs such a big house for the two of us? “Max,” she said aloud, “what’s going to be with us?”
Her husband stirred in his sleep and grunted something, then lay still and silent. She didn’t want to cry. Was she going through change of life? Was she going to be one of “those” women? She’d heard of women going crazy at this time in their life. It wasn’t fair to her that Elly should leave.
What’s going to be with me? she thought, forgetting to crush her cigarette in the ash tray and letting the room fill with smoke as the tobacco became a long thin ash which was finally cold and crumbled at the touch of her breath when she reached over to shut off the lamp.
The day before she was to leave for Vernon, Vermont, Elly said good-by joyfully to all her friends in town, feeling love for those girls and boys she’d fought with and hated, and for Jerry Wilson a great pity as the voyager feels for the land-held. She was like a girl whose parents had been seafarers and who had died far inland, leaving her to make her way toward some dimly remembered sea. This was to be her first big step toward the coast beyond which was an enormous world of possibility.
That night after supper she walked about the house, running her hands over the cool glass, as if memorizing it by touch. She took snapshots of the house from many angles, even one from the bottom of the hill. Then, not from any desire, but because she knew they would be hurt if she didn’t, she asked her mother and father to pose for a picture in front of the house. They had furnished her with enough accouterments to last a lifetime, from an extensive wardrobe to a camera and flash-bulb outfit. In addition to this a lavish allowance was promised.
“What else should I do with my money?” Max said, when Elly had kissed him after being told how much she was to have each month.
She was feeling so benign toward the world in general that she took from her wallet an envelope, on which was written: Mrs. John Marron Lang. Inside reposed, as it had since she had written it five months before, the letter which began, “Dear Mrs. Lang: Your husband and I—” If she set a match to it now, she knew she would never write another one. It had served, during periods of deep depression in the months since Lang had left, as a potential action against, rather than Lang himself, the great world which had left her here, stranded far inland, while the world in which Lang moved, made love to his wife, built his houses, went on without her. It made her feel, in some odd way, a little less helpless; it was her secret weapon.
