by Hugh Hood
What use would an ex-editor of Signorina be to anyone after the magazine had stopped making money, wasn’t even a sound tax write-off, had lost most of its colour pages and didn’t attract writers? But she would be on another magazine, that’s where she’d be, not toasting her toes in front of a cozy fire. If you’re any good, you attract jobs, there would always be jobs for Alexandra Ellicott, and anyway there was a lot of life in Signorina yet, and still would be for ten years.
Ten years.
For the fowl reposing, or more accurately, floating on it, her plate was too small. Little waves of a questionable wine sauce rippled dangerously close to the edge, nobody is perfect. So she bent her eyes to her food, raising them carefully only now and then. If people would react that way when she looked at them, she would shut her eyes.
“They gave us a lot of money, and since then we’ve got more,” he said pridefully, “a great deal more, and we’ve got a building.”
She had no idea of the symbolic value of real estate properties, actually in being, to academic promoters. “What sort of a building?”
“An archive with three seminar rooms and an auditorium. Very good sound equipment. We were really clairvoyant, you know. When we projected the Institute back in 1957, the first man we interviewed in depth — I wrote the questions — was Jack.”
“Institute of what?”
He looked at her blankly. “Ethics and Politics, didn’t you really know? The Institute of Ethics and Politics.”
“Sweetie, it isn’t exactly my field.” One of the least charming things she’d ever said, and she knew it very well. His eyes begin to range around the room and in a minute, she was certain, he would begin to tell her who were there, she could feel his eyes growing rounder and rounder as he stared. It was very quiet. In a corner somebody was bouncing a pair of dice off a glass.
“You’re a celebrity too, don’t forget that,” she said, looking at her drowned duckling.
“I’m simply old Jim Savitt.”
“McGeorge is simply old McGeorge, and you’re very close to Jack.”
He beamed. “But I can sit here and nobody knows me.”
“Ah,” she gave him, feeling her kind regard move around him and warm him, “ah, now you’re getting the idea!”
“I’d sooner everybody knew.”
“No you don’t, no you don’t.”
“And this isn’t your métier either,” he said, in bewilderment. “I’d have thought this was you, absolutely to the teeth.”
“Nobody knows me.”
“Oh, that’s not so,” he said, wounded, “everybody knows you.”
“Everybody has heard of me. But I keep pretty well to myself.”
The heavy silence which ensued lasted all the way uptown. There had been some question of listening to music in a club way downtown but they gave it up. When he got her home, he left abruptly and she concluded, with imperfect satisfaction, that she’d scared him off for good. And she must have been right because he didn’t show again for a long time, and when he did, he’d learned some new tricks.
The red and black tug on the river had just about made it through the bridge. The children were beginning to leave the park. In half an hour the twilight would begin to rise, all purple, from east of Idlewild, and she sat on in the shadowy room waiting for old Jim Savitt, just in from Accra, to come and fix dinner for her. He’d told her his troubles at length on the telephone only yesterday, off the plane forty-five minutes and through customs as a diplomat.
“I figured two strikes was enough,” he’d said angrily, “after that silly business at ‘21’ because I’m too old to learn new modish habits, I’m forty.”
“Jack is forty-three,” she’d said gaily, “and the papers treat him like a baby.”
“What’s young in politics is old in love or baseball. Forty-year-old lovers, good heavens,” he’d exclaimed helplessly and then paused.
“What made you decide to call me?”
“Just before I took the plane I was standing on the corner of 49th Street, just before noon, looking up Madison, innocence itself. I’d intended never to bother you again, imagine you in Middletown! You know how sunny that long street can be at noon. Well, I just looked up and down, standing there minding my own affairs, and folding and refolding my ticket in my hands — I’d just picked it up and I’d been reading the fine print on the back.”
“You know where Signorina is.”
“But I hadn’t remembered, so I couldn’t help but see you leave the building for lunch and that little blond boy with you.”
“Him,” she said, grimacing, “I remember that day but I didn’t see you. Honestly, Jim, I’d have preferred you to him, oh, say eleven thousand times.”
“Alix,” he said tentatively, beseechingly, “what do you want to fool around with those types for?”
“It goes with the job.”
“Anyway you came along in a camel-hair coat.…”
“Not camel-hair!”
“… and my vision blurred like a Steichen photograph, all full of sun and haze. I don’t know about chic but I thought your hair looked marvellous. The new anchovy hairdo.”
“Anchovy?”
“Isn’t it anchovy?”
“You mean artichoke,” she said, howling with laughter. She began to think what an anchovy cut would look like, spiky and nipped off at the ears, and at that there were fool women who’d wear it if you ordered them to.
“Anybody can make a mistake,” he said a bit sulkily, “and it’s artichoke if you say so, although one sounds as ridiculous as the other. But you looked like something out of that darned old magazine, and I guess that’s what I want.”
“Not for export.”
“No, you’re indigenous to the island, you wouldn’t bloom in Middletown, but I might just survive here. I survived in Ghana and I was thinking about you all the time. I decided never to take you to a restaurant again.”
“That limits things.”
“Not at all, because if you’ll let me I’ll come up and fix dinner for both of us, and I won’t have to worry about forks.”
“Come ahead then, Thursday, and I’ll stay home.”
She had been afraid that he might proffer a Ghanaian meal, which dismayed her because among the profoundest of her few political notions was the conviction that Mr. Nkrumah was a jerk who needed a kick in the pants. She was uninterested in the menus of Ghana. So when Jim appeared in the doorway with his face pink from the last of the sun and breeze, with his two bulging paper sacks of obviously gourmet foods from the delicatessen, she was much relieved.
He was the kind of man who is attracted, even sold, by a connoisseur label in a fake Baskerville font. He would buy “Callard and Bowser’s” butterscotch instead of “Fanny Farmer” because he liked the execution of the thistle on the wrapper, and the butterscotch was tasteless and not so good as the native line. The words “Crosse and Blackwell” were a kind of incantation to Jim. Around Thanksgiving he always went through the little announcements in the back of Esquire and Sports Illustrated and sent by mail-order canned smoked turkeys and hams, pheasant, and frozen porterhouse, to people in Departments of Government all over the continent.
Tonight his paper sacks bulged with enough overpriced food for three meals — he had succumbed to the rigours of the delicatessen. There were several bottles of wine, none of them labels she knew; but as she knew nothing about wine anyway she wasn’t discomfited. He absolutely bounced into the kitchen area, opening the refrigerator possessively and staring in transfixed.
“For once I’ve been right. There’s nothing in here.”
“There’s some cottage cheese in the crisper,” she said, feeling proud that she knew the word “crisper.” She never used the kitchen.
“Where do you eat? How do you live?”
“Here and there,” she said evasively, �
�sometimes I eat in Nedicks.”
“What do you weigh?”
She was in her turn transfixed; she had never been asked that before. “A hundred and six,” she said automatically, “and I ought to take off about three pounds.” She didn’t know what had gotten into him; it couldn’t have been the Accra trip and she was certain that he hadn’t been offered a Washington appointment.
“You ought to put on about thirty-three pounds,” he said positively, handing her a glass of sherry and a dry biscuit, and at the same time pulling a handful of endive out of one of the bags. She had an exact horrid intuition of the menu and all at once she couldn’t bear it or prolong it any further.
“Look,” she said, “now look Jim, this is foolish. You don’t want to hang around me.”
He bumped his head on the refrigerator as he straightened up. “Yes I do.”
“There isn’t even any ground for discussion,” she said candidly, “none whatsoever and I won’t let you try. You can’t make it.”
“The salad?”
“The scene, the time, the rhythm, making it in the media world, look at me, for heaven’s sake, would you willingly be like me?”
“As close as I can get.”
“You’re very foolish.”
“Oh, you don’t know what you are,” he said fondly, “don’t you know that all the way from here, through Westport, to Middletown, you’re it?”
“It?”
“To be alone in this apartment with you, over a private supper, is as far as I can go, I’ve made it, I’m in.”
She was looking at the label on a bottle of Margaux; there was a vineyard scene in three off-register colours, very badly executed, on the paper. “Tell me all about it,” she said quietly.
“To begin with, you’re entrancing. Nobody talks like you, nobody else has a voice like yours or jokes as you do or dresses as you do, or is so much admired. If I were married to you Alix, even for six months, I’d have everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“Even for six months” is so deeply naively corrupt that she shudders. “I want to try to tell you something that’s hard to express, an abstract idea, and I’m not used to them. You’re the one who deals in abstractions, so you can piece the thing out.”
“Say it then!”
“Jim, I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer care, I do not care, I don’t have to care. I don’t have to look onwards and upwards because I’m up where one arrives. Jack and Jackie aren’t here yet, they’re still trying to arrive.”
“That’s right,” he says, his face glowing.
“I think that on this continent there may be a hundred people like me, hidden away here and there, people who don’t have to care, who are really really free who don’t have to have a car or a telephone or a new dress. There was once an old Duke of Norfolk, oh, eighty years ago, who wore smelly old clothes and when his friends remonstrated with him he said: ‘On my estates everybody knows me and in town no one does.’ And he did as he pleased, as I do.”
“The Duchess of Gracie?”
“Exactly, the Duchess of Gracie, because I can be simply purely unaffectedly independent.”
“You could lose your job, you could lose your looks, you could starve.”
“As to my job: the whole tone of American life would have to change for me to lose my job, or the certainty of always having such a job. Jim, I’m further left than Nikita, I say things that no one can say, and I say them publicly, and I’ll never want for jobs. To destroy me would be to destroy what everybody wants. Therefore I won’t starve. As to my looks: I’m thirty-six, Jim, and I was never a beauty, I carry no charge of sex, thank the good God, no one desires me for bed. That’s not what you’ve wanted from me. I please you, I charm the hell out of you, but you don’t want to get my dress off. I don’t mean that I haven’t been loved, because I have, I’ve been adored by everybody and I’ve had what’s better than sex and I’ve never had to take my dress off. Men don’t treat me like a comfortable divan for lounging, they respect me and I please them, they talk to me and listen. When he’s with me, that poor little blond boy isn’t afraid of girls and isn’t, for the time being, homosexual, for a while I make him whole and able. The men who are true men can talk to me without my sex getting in the way, and so they come to respect a woman for once in their lives, instead of wanting to parade me before them nude, or spank me indecently, like one of those poor girls in Playboy. I can even make somebody who reads Playboy feel like a man, and that’s extremely hard.”
“This is all true, but it’s hard on you.”
“Yes, it’s taking everything I have, it’s making me invisible. Nobody knows me, everybody aspires to me, because I’m the untouchable Sandy Ellicott.”
“Who could have you, Picasso?”
“No, he’s too old and not pure enough.”
“Sidney Hook?”
“Sidney Hook is a salesman and you know it.”
“General De Gaulle?”
“Married already, but you’re close.”
“Me?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then I suppose that’s that.”
“I think that it is, Jim. You can’t make it, Jim, you don’t have the kind of mind.”
“Shall I leave the wine?”
“Leave it on the counter. I’ll drink some of it sometime.”
“Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye, Jim.”
She hears the door close softly behind her but she doesn’t pay much attention because she’s watching the spectacle that pleases her more than anything in the world. Now it’s just past eight o’clock and from over in the east past Idlewild the twilight has moved up along the whole horizon, purple mostly, with softening patches of black; the vault of the sky is full of daylight and she can see the purple move and flood up into the pink sky, Signorina colours, purple and pink, how about a pink logotype on purple, the stars come out and the lights go on, the crowded river darkening below her window, the shouting children leaving the park with their nurses early in the late summer evening. Their last shouts rise faintly and a helium-filled balloon floats on somebody’s balcony railing two floors below.
The purple comes roundly on, coming to meet her, and the light is changing so fast now that she can see the values altering second by second, dying pink merging to green to purple to black, and for an instant she is at the poolside watching Jenny and Michael flicking the water with their toes, and once more the roundness of their limbs makes her heart move lightly.
Now at length the sky is full purple, all the city lights are on, and she forgets about the children and thinks hard about jumping a story from page 113 to page 64 in the January issue, deciding that she will almost certainly have to do it though she hates to do it, and wondering if anybody will understand.
Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks
When I was a child of six, in the summer of 1934, my parents sent me to a camp on the south shore of Lake Simcoe, at the upper end of the Trent Canal system, wonderful trolling and cruising waters in those days, and nowadays just about fished-out. The camp was run by a religious community of men, teaching Brothers who also conducted several Toronto schools, and I remember seeing their brochure around-the house for several days before my agonized and unwilling departure. It quoted Whittier, as I recall:
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools.
There was a certain amount of truth in the second line. There were little line drawings in a green ink, in this brochure, of boys fishing, diving, running races, gashing their knees on rocks, the whole myth, overnight hikes, nature lore. I was still practically an infant. I hadn’t gone to nursery school — it wasn’t the fashion in those days — or to kindergarten, as the Catholic School System in the city didn’t provide them. So I was still an inhabitant of the warm intimate world of post-babyhood, den
ned by the length of one’s block. I was allowed to cross streets, but I wasn’t venturesome about it. I suppose that my parents wanted to get me out of the house for a summer, a motive I would have questioned then, with the fierce possessiveness of the young child, but which I can fully appreciate now that I’ve two of my own.
The camp seemed enormous to me that first season. Last summer I drove past it, and you wouldn’t believe how small and shrunken it seemed. In 1934 it seemed limitless and wild, the woods growing right up behind the straggling line of tents inhabited by the older campers — the littlest kids slept in neat wooden cabins and were very grateful for the added touch of civilization; it meant something to graduate into a row of tents.
In front of the Administration Building stood a tall flagpole, where a flag-raising ceremony was enacted each morning, and where two buglers blew retreat at sundown. I had never heard the retreat call before, and I haven’t heard it blown for fifteen years, but I can still whistle it note for note.
Two different boys served as duty-buglers each week. I didn’t understand how it was, having learned nothing of the great world as yet, that so many of the older boys at the camp could play this beguiling instrument, on which I longed to be able to execute myself. After I had been there two weeks my parents drove up for the weekend to see how I was getting along, and I can see now that they had been as affected by my absence as I had been by theirs. I had missed them unutterably, though in different ways, my slim pretty mother with her comfortable big French-Canadian nose, her “proboscis” she called it, a funny word which always made me gurgle when she said it, and my handsome excitable father whom I adored and whom I longed to understand. He made a lot of remarks which I knew must be very funny because my mother laughed and laughed at them, and I wished I knew what was funny in what he said. I found out later on: he had a desperate streak of defensive irony. He was a man of position but no education, and it strained him dreadfully to hide this.
I asked them about all these buglers. “Why can Paul and Harold Phelan, and all the Juniors and Seniors, play the bugle? Do you think I could play the bugle sometime?”
