The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel

by Daniel Stern

  “I didn’t say good-by to anyone, not really,” she said quietly. There was no use fighting, she thought. Nothing could be won, now. “I didn’t even look at the campus or anything, not really,” she said.

  Cry, damn you, Max thought, cry! He put his hand lightly on her arm and said, “No one will know, Elly—especially not your mother,” realizing for the first time in a deep sense how afraid his daughter was of her mother and how much he wanted to assure her that she was at least safe from reprisal.

  “Okay, Dad,” she said numbly, “okay,” as if the ethics of war forbade complaining, arguing or struggling once defeat was known to be a reality.

  “She’s too sick. It would be terrible for her to know,” he added lamely.

  She was silent, overcome now by an enormous fatigue, the backwash of the month of anxiety over her illness and of the tension of the concert and the knowledge of having experienced, to a certain extent conquered and lost, a world. As the train moved and stopped, moved and stopped, Elly fell asleep, waking, before the Pullman porter was to make up her bed in the compartment, to cry, holding tightly to her father, as if no years had intervened between the first time she had fallen down on the hard pavement, bruising her soft flesh, and now, the Pullman porter taking the place of the innumerable strangers who always watched one cry.

  It must have been about four in the morning when she decided, after staring at the ceiling for a half hour. Listening to her father’s even breathing and waiting for a break in the regularity, she carefully dressed. Her desire to do something was vague and unfocused and she knew whatever it was to be would be only temporary. Yet she would do it anyway. She would go to Uncle Alec in California. The last money order received from home hadn’t even been cashed as yet. There was enough there for her to fly. She could probably be there the following day. She had no idea to what point in the trip the train was carrying them through the black night which seemed pasted on the compartment window. The only thing to do was to wear her dressing gown over her clothes and wait for the train’s next stop, wherever it might be.

  She stood near the door, ready to open it, hearing her father mumble in his sleep and shift a little uneasily. Oh my God! she thought. She knew suddenly that if he were to talk in his sleep, to say anything at all, no matter how meaningless or delirious, she could not go. But Max subsided into soft snores again and Elly slipped silently out. She took none of her luggage.

  After a moment she returned and, finding a pencil in her father’s jacket, scribbled a note telling him where she had gone. That way there would be no police or anything, and she would still have a few days.

  She had never known a train made so much noise. It screeched to a stop and she stepped down into the murmurous darkness, for a moment or a day, free.

  PART FOUR

  TALL AND SLENDER, ALEC MOVED among the chairs and the table like a dancer, quite light on his feet, vigorously polishing a glass. He moved, humming, into the living room where, from a large console, there dribbled the sounds of a cocktail-style pianist. He almost tripped and bent a moment to rearrange the carpet. Squatting there, he saw for a moment the house as he had not seen it before. A stranger (and he was a stranger to it himself, he and Annette having rented it for three months, only two weeks ago) might find it at first sight rather impressive. A small two-story house, it possessed a large sunken living room, fireplace and a lively assortment of old and modern pieces. From two large picture windows he could see, in the blue haze of early evening, the beginning of the long, lonely beach. And it was all costing him only ninety-five a month—no, he caught himself, not him—costing Annette and Max ninety-five a month. He walked to the impromptu bar set up shakily on a bridge table, no longer humming. The pianist on the radio had been joined by an orchestra. He popped a few cherries into his mouth and felt a wave of focusless unhappiness start from his stomach.

  He was remembering the first time he had become aware of how similar he and Elly were. She had been about nine and he had just finished his drama course at the Morriss School and had been visiting Max and his family. He’d loved little Elly till then with the abstract kind of affection one feels for nieces (although he’d never much cared for Charlotte, Harry’s girl). Then out of a clear blue sky she’d said, “You know, Uncle Alec, I think there ought to be music all the time. It’s not fair to let us have music sometimes and then take it away. I mean, when I wake up in the morning there should be music. Right away without waiting for the radio.”

  “But that’s impossible, honey. Well, almost impossible. You can think music all the time if you want to.”

  “That’s not the same as really hearing it. You know that. Maybe if I had a phonograph, I could fill it up with stacks of the records I want and when I get home from school I could have it play until late at night.”

  Music all the time. It was like Max telling him: “I understand you, Alec, I really do. But you can’t have a life of fancy-free. Sometimes you’ve got to be practical. All right, you’ve finished your actor’s school. So you’re an actor. Take a job here with me or with Harry until you get set in your chosen field.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Max. Believe me it doesn’t. You’ve got to stick with it day and night.”

  “Okay. Go and be healthy. Wait, I’ll give you a check.”

  Music all the time. What a crazy idea! Yet, didn’t he live that way? What had he felt that time before he’d met Annette, when things got so bad for Max that the checks became smaller and smaller and finally stopped altogether? He’d got a job in an office and his primary reaction had not been to the boredom or the stupidity of his fellow workers but to the fact that the tone of life became dry and brown. To be depressed became more than just an emotional state; it was to have the juice drained from life, to lose the sense of identity, to have the lunch hour become a time of crazy ecstasy.

  Music all the time. To wake in the morning backed by music, to stand at the window backed by music. Well, he’d tried to keep it that way at a great cost. His mind flickered at the edge of the thought: What is it costing Elly, remembering the night letter from Max: So I’ll pick her up and bring her home where we can keep an eye on our girl. How she’d wanted to get away and now—Anything that you missed someone else got and anything someone else missed came to you. He’d got away and Elly had to return. Music all the time.

  He’d promised her a phonograph that time and of course he had no money so Max had to make good on his promise. He smiled and thought: That’s the story of my life. The phone rang and he had the sudden sensation that while he’d been sunk in thought it had been buzzing at least four or five times. He ran for it.

  “Hello, Alec?”

  “Hello, dear. You finished shopping yet?”

  “No. But I’m almost through. Been studying your part?”

  “No, I’ve been setting up for the party.”

  “I’ll do all that. You do some work.”

  “No, I’ve been still sort of upset about Max’s telegram. I should have gone with him. He would have felt better, the kid would have felt better—”

  “You mean everybody would have felt better except you.”

  “That’s the idea. And I’m not feeling very good right now. Maybe I’ll call tonight. They should be back by then.”

  “That’s an idea.” Annette’s voice was a little distant, patient as if waiting for the subject to pass so that she and Alec could establish contact again.

  Alec was aware of this. “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just, if you wanted to go you should have gone.”

  “Yes, but you know. I didn’t want to go.”

  “Well, you didn’t want to face your brother, that’s all. What were you afraid he’d ask you—why don’t you settle down and marry a nice Jewish girl. Leave that shicksa?”

  “Oh, cut it out, Ann.”

  “All right. I just think you should be honest with yourself about why you didn’t go. I know how crazy you are about Elly and I also k
now it must have been a pretty powerful fear which kept you from going to her when she needed you.”

  “Don’t put it that way. She didn’t need me. It was all over but the shouting by the time I got Max’s telegram. It was just—well, let’s not go through that again.”

  “Does Max know we’re living together?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Would the checks still come if he knew it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Please, Anny, I’m feeling pretty low today.” He hadn’t turned the radio down and an orchestra was playing a jumble of sound into his ears. Music all the time.

  “All right, Alec. Listen, the Ballet Theater is in town, so guess who I bumped into?”

  “Jay! Jay Gordon. Hey, that’s terrific! Did you ask him to come tonight? Is he working tonight? No, it’s Monday. Boy, I haven’t seen him—”

  “He said he’ll be around later. But listen, don’t forget the reason for this damned shindig. So wish me a happy anniversary.”

  “Happy anniversary, dearest! Why don’t you bring home a little surprise, like a two-month-old baby? Inside, I mean, of course.”

  “Don’t be a wise guy. I’ll be home soon. ’By now.”

  Alec lowered the radio and, glancing at the clock on the bookcase, made sure that it was after five before mixing a shaker full of Martinis and pouring one for himself. He stood at the window, sipping the drink, a dish rag flung over his shoulder, thinking about Jay Gordon, remembering his short pudgy fingers on the piano keys and the look on his bony face when he played the “Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue.” The rest of us are all phonies, Alec thought, compared to Jay. All the talk about our art and the rest, scrounging around to live so that our work is central. You never heard that kind of talk from Jay and yet he was a terrific artist. It was an old joke when he had gone to the Morriss School in New York and had met Annette there, just beginning to study dancing, that if you wanted a cheap date you just took the girl up to Jay’s place and listened to him play. He would play through the night, sometimes, now joking and kidding about his playing, now so oblivious to who was listening that the gag was you could get laid on the couch behind Jay’s back, while he played a Chopin nocturne, provided you finished before the last chord was sounded by those thick, amazing fingers.

  He finished his drink and decided to wait for Annette before having another. Christ, he was lucky! It was that music all the time business. Building life around a fantasy, making it conform to some crazy, inner vision. Acting, Annette and something less tangible that was composed of evenings at the beach and waking in the morning to study a part, or sitting before the tall windows gazing at the cliffs that rimmed the beach. But it was the substance of this inner vision that troubled him.

  For a man whose goals from the beginning had been of the most serious kind, he was too affected by externals. Why had he chosen to buck the studios instead of the New York stage? Perhaps the California style had intrigued him after the flat, tasteless plains of his home. He knew that his only justification for being where he was and not back home working for Max or Harry was that he had something to offer in what Max always called (as if he were afraid to mention the drama or the movies as being too silly) his “chosen profession.” And when he was on the stage at the little playhouse at which a group of his friends, most of them unemployed, produced plays, he knew his own value: himself as Trock Estrella, the gangster in Winterset—the hacking cough, the drawn tubercular vision of the world; himself as the Reverend Davidson in Rain—a whole structure of faith crumbling at the breath of a prostitute. He knew what he could do. It was the rest of the time that bothered him. The time that hung so heavily on one who knew that not a fraction of himself was being used, the time that dreamed furtively of a movie star’s life.

  Why did he have to love Annette Lawrence, gentile dancer? It was as if he had needed a concrete symbol to place between himself and his family to say, She is lovely, she dances and you could never accept her in your home because she is not of the same religion as you. Therefore I am different from you and my world must be different. It was this covert dissatisfaction with himself and confusion of values that disturbed the morning’s clarity and ruffled the evening’s poise.

  What troubles me essentially is this, he thought: I’m thirty and I don’t know whether the world is The Brothers Karamazov or a musical comedy. The light, lilting music from the radio touched his mood, already made a trifle high by the one drink on an empty stomach. It seemed to isolate each piece of furniture against its particular background. As this happened, space seemed to disappear; there was only the tension between objects, so that vibrations were set up between all the objects in the room that weaved and interweaved all around, creating an area of tension that could be called a stage. He stepped forward (it went this way with his best performances at the very rare times) and waited for some lines to come. Instead, the doorbell rang. It was Jay, standing outside the door, tall and bulky, his smiling face with its rather long pointed nose, like a reminder from school days, saying: Look, Alec, you’re thirty years old already and what have you done?

  “Hello, Alec. How are you?”

  “How am I? Jesus! How the hell are you? It’s been some time. Sit down. Give me your hat. Boy, some chapeau! You’ve been doing well.”

  “Not bad financially too, Alec, not bad. Let us have one of those drinks on yon table.”

  Alec flung the hat he had admired onto the couch.

  “Drink? I’ll say! This is a reunion. How long has it been?”

  “I saw you three years ago in New York. You were there on some picture deal. How’d that come out?”

  “Like all the others so far. I was looking for a big role. All I got was a bit.”

  “Well, what can you do?”

  “I heard about you and Jeannie. Larry Simons told me.”

  “Yes. We’ve been divorced for about a year now. Separated for a year before that. I didn’t know word had got up this far. Coast to coast. That’s Larry for you.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Alec said, handing Jay his drink, “it was more startling to hear about something else.” He paused, suddenly a little embarrassed. The reunion hadn’t been going the way he had expected it to go. Somehow, seeing Jay he realized how much he had resented what Jay had done, the resentment lying in his consciousness, just a little below the respect for Jay’s talent and the excitement at seeing him once again.

  “You mean about quitting my concerts?”

  “Not the quitting. I understood that. I spoke to Jeannie and she made it damned clear she couldn’t see being married to an up-and-coming concert pianist all her life. She was explicit too, your ex-wife was. She wanted a steady income and three kids. No more, no less.”

  “Well then, you can see why I quit. The first year we were married I netted seventeen hundred dollars, some wonderful reviews, and no children. So I quit American Concerts Corporation and took a job playing at a hotel cocktail lounge.”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake!”

  “No, for my wife’s sake. But it just didn’t work out. You know this is quite a place you’ve got here.”

  “Only ninety-five a month. Don’t change the subject. Why didn’t you go back?”

  Jay stood up and walked along the thick rug to the piano. “Nice rug,” he said. “Jeannie always wanted wall-to-wall carpeting like this.” He ran his fingers lightly over the piano.

  “It’s dusty,” he said and turned to Alec. “Oh, what would you say if I asked you why you weren’t living the way you lived three years ago? What could you say? What can I say?”

  “Well, I have an answer, but it’s not your answer. Mine is Annette.”

  “Well, good. I have none.”

  “But a guy gives up a concert career because his wife can’t see it. All right. But when she’s not his wife two years later and he still plays just as well, what’s he doing running around the country with a ballet company—?”

  “Playing oom-pahs,” J
ay interjected.

  “Playing oom-pahs,” Alec accepted. “Why not pick up where you left off? Make believe you were in the army three years.”

  “I was. How many times can you pick up? I guess it was just one too many. It’s not too bad in the ballet. I’m used to touring. I’ve got a strong stomach.”

  “Yeah, but this is a far cry from the kind of touring you used to do.”

  “Sure, the life of a concert pianist. London, Paris, Rome, Vienna. The capitals of the world. I went to Europe once on tour—State Department sponsored me. I played in cities in Germany you never heard of. Rubinstein went to the capitals of the world.”

  “I’m sorry if I seem to be pushing it, Jay, but you were building a real name for yourself when you got married.”

  “Well I gave Jeannie my name and she wouldn’t give it back. I don’t know, Alec, I don’t know why. I guess I had the crazy kind of drive that, once it goes, it goes. When I quit I had to give up the whole fantasy-world we live in—and I just haven’t got it back, that’s all. I’m out of shape now anyway.”

  He sat down at the piano and played an octave run that sounded shimmering and beautiful to Alec. “See what I mean?” Jay said.

  “Sure,” Alec replied and leaning over Jay’s shoulder he spilled out a meaningless parody of the run. “See, I can do it too,” he said. “Anybody can.”

  Jay rose quickly.

  “It’s a jungle, Alec,” he said bitterly. “You know that. This way I’m safe. The same number of weeks at the same pay every year. And when the applause comes it’s for the ballerina, not for me, and I don’t have to worry am I really that good and will they ask me back next season. I let them worry about that. Have you got a cigarette? I’m all out.”