by Frank Conroy
Lady's room evoked, as always, an erotic thrill. The angling light, the faint scent of her, the very walls bringing up countless hours of afternoon lovemaking. Even with her things gone, the mattress bare in the tiny bedroom, her books, clothes, and knickknacks boxed up and taken away, even in the startling emptiness he felt his body quicken.
"Good," she said, looking at the lithograph. "Could you take it down?"
It was a Braque, but not cubist. A young girl sitting at a windowsill, her hair to her waist, her small breasts partially exposed. Her expression was one of resigned sadness, and of innocence. Lady had bought it one summer on a trip to Pans. Claude stood on the bed and gently lifted it from the wall.
"She knows some secrets," Lady said.
"You can say that again." He got down from the bed and impulsively gave the girl in the picture a soft kiss.
"Lady?" It was the voice of Ted Powers at the threshold. "We're ready."
With Claude carrying the lithograph, they followed him through the hall, out the main door, through the arch, and out to the street. Ted went to the driver's side of the station wagon, reached in, and got the keys. He opened the tailgate and said, "Put it in there, on top." Claude obeyed, and Ted closed the gate and went behind the wheel without looking at Claude.
Behind the station wagon was a large black limousine. Claude turned to see Lady taking a last look at the dorm. Her mother rolled down the station wagon window. "Will the back seat be all right, dear?"
"Sure." She looked at Claude, who came forward.
"Well," he said.
"You'll call me tonight?"
"Yes."
From inside the station wagon her father had reached over the seat and opened the rear door. Lady got in, started to pull the door shut, and then paused. Through the glass Claude could see her face, the look of vexation. He was backing away when she suddenly popped out of the car, skipped over, and threw her arms around his neck. "Give me a kiss," she said, moving her face close to his. "A long one."
He did so, feeling the soft press of her belly.
When she broke away he saw the stunned, immobile faces of her parents. She got in and the station wagon pulled rapidly from the curb. Then came the limousine, Senator Barnes alone in back smoking a cigar. The old man gave Claude a barely perceptible nod as he passed.
15
AT HIS ACCUSTOMED PLACE behind the counter, Mr. Weisfeld coughed leaned back on his stool and turned a page of the Herald Tribune leaned back on his stool, and turned a page of the "It says here they're thinking about tearing down the el."
Claude, having replenished the stock of number 3 valve oil, slid the drawer shut. "The Third Avenue el?"
"It's getting old, apparently."
Claude turned to look out the front window. "It's hard to imagine what it would look like." He picked up a broom and began sweeping the back aisle.
"Stop with the make-work," Weisfeld said. "Sit for a minute. You're making me nervous."
Claude obeyed, taking his stool by the harmonica case. "There'd be more sun."
"After all these years I wouldn't be able to go to sleep at night without the trains." Weisfeld folded the paper. "You're jumpy. You've been jumpy for weeks. What's up?"
"Jumpy? Really?"
"How's it going with the song cycle?"
Claude was composing a set of songs based on Blake's Innocence and Experience. "I got past a big problem this morning. I wish I knew more about the human voice as an instrument, though."
"Don't worry. These days they can sing anything. Just keep going. What about the girlfriend?" For some reason Weisfeld rarely referred to Lady by name. Claude thought he was merely teasing.
"Terrific," Claude said. "I'm going out to their house on Long Island this weekend."
"Don't forget to bring a house present for the momma." Weisfeld yawned. "Something tasteful. A little different. A can of matrons glaces maybe. Gristede's has them."
Claude remembered his first visit to the townhouse on Seventy-third Street. A brownstone. He'd gone down three steps from the sidewalk and pressed the bell. Through the heavy wrought-iron door and the glass behind it he saw, as the lights went on, a tiny room with a floor of veined marble. A sort of lobby, empty except for a gold-framed mirror on the wall, a small half table below it, and a coat rack. A second door, six feet away, opened and Lady emerged, shooing back a uniformed maid even as she smiled through the wrought iron at Claude. She pulled open the heavy door and Claude entered.
"Now don't be put off by all this grandeur," she said. "It doesn't mean a thing. Believe me."
They went through the second door. He sensed the kitchen to the rear. Heavy, dark oak door frames, doors with polished brass fixtures leading to unseen rooms off to the left. Straight ahead, the staircase, deep maroon runner, a brass strip gleaming on every step. A heavy silence as he followed her up, dark portraits lining the wall, her ankles glinting.
At the top they turned onto the landing. Oriental rugs. An antique chair and desk with a telephone, a few leather books, a brass lamp, and a copy of the Social Register. A series of small oil landscapes in elaborate gilt frames. Lady strode forward and opened the door to the brightness of the living room.
As she stepped aside he saw French windows. Ted Powers was seated in an armchair beside the couch, reading the paper, a drink at his elbow and a tan cocker spaniel at his feet, and Linda Powers sat at a small antique secretary with her back to him, writing a letter. There was a feeling of stasis, as if the room and everything in it were a painting, or a stage set five seconds before the curtain.
"Here's Claude," Lady said cheerfully.
Their white faces turned.
"What is marrons glacés?" Claude asked Weisfeld.
"Chestnuts. Candied chestnuts. Very fancy."
Earlier that summer, in fact at the very first opportunity, Claude had brought Lady to the store, to meet Weisfeld and to show her the studio. Weisfeld had donuts and coffee ready.
"I've heard a great deal about you, Mr. Weisfeld," Lady had said. "Claude says he owes everything to you."
Weisfeld smiled and patted her arm. "Claude is of course wrong. He owes maybe to God, but not to me. But he was right about you. I can tell that already."
Weisfeld had given her a rather longer than necessary tour of the shop, chatting easily about the instruments, his customers (some of them famous!), and throwing in an occasional humorous anecdote. Claude went along behind him, moved by Weisfeld's politeness and solicitude. He'd been nervous, for no reason he could name, about their meeting.
"I like him," Lady had said downstairs in the studio. "He's sweet."
Claude could not really fault her for this banality. Weisfeld had in fact seemed somewhat guarded to Claude, falling back on the humble but sophisticated European Jewish shopkeeper role that had served him so well with his Park Avenue clientele, and about which Claude and Weisfeld had sometimes joked.
"He's...," Claude struggled. "He's complicated. The war..." It was too much to explain. "He's a wonderful teacher. I wish you could know how good."
"I believe you," she'd said.
Now, Weisfeld got up and took the keys from the shelf under the register. "So, should we take a look?"
He and Claude left the store, locked up, and walked to the corner. It was a hot afternoon, and beads of perspiration formed on Weisfeld's brow almost immediately. He looked up at the el.
"I bet they'll do it," he said. "The street is wide, you know, wider than it looks. They'll take up the cobblestones and pave it over." He wiped his head with a handkerchief. "May be good for business."
They walked west on Eighty-fourth Street past a couple of buildings to number 186, an old tenement. Weisfeld climbed the stoop and paused at the top, breathing heavily, coughing into his handkerchief. "Mrs. Keller told me about this. Mr. Obromowitz—I've seen him around—anyway he's got bad rheumatism or something, so he went out to Arizona someplace because it's supposed to be good for rheumatism. People will believe anything."
They entered, went past the mailboxes, and unlocked the inner entry door. "So he's going to try it, but he doesn't want to let go of his room in case Arizona doesn't work out. We're talking a month-to-month sublease, off the books." With the same key he opened Obromowitz's door. "Not bad. First floor, in front, at least."
It was very simple—a bed, bureau, table, two chairs by the front window, a hot plate and half refrigerator against the rear wall, and a small bathroom in back. The room was dominated by an entire wall of books, floor to ceiling. Thousands of books.
"Wow," said Claude, moving forward. He saw fiction, history, biography, philosophy, poetry, art books. Complete sets of Dickens, Conrad, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Books in German, French, and Hebrew. "What does Mr. Obromowitz do?"
"He was a lens grinder, I believe," Weisfeld said. "Before the rheumatism."
The place was scrupulously clean. "This is perfect," Claude said. "I'll tell Mrs. Keller right away."
Weisfeld nodded. "Thirty-five dollars a month. It's a steal."
The Chinese waiter smiled and made a little dipping motion before clearing away the plates and bowls—an astounding number of them, and all of them empty.
Emma burped quietly into her napkin. "Excuse me."
"Well I sure ain't gonna be hungry in an hour," Al said. "Mercy!"
"So how did it happen?" Claude asked.
"You remember Mullins? The doorman?"
Claude nodded.
"A mean drunk. Just got worse over the years, and getting to be an old man, really."
"He used to run the elevator when I practiced at the maestro's."
"Well, he got promoted to doorman. So one day he's on his break, dead drunk on that ratty old couch they use over by the storage rooms. I wake him up when it's time—I used to do that, you know, trying to be nice—and when he gets halfway up he gets the heaves, and pretty soon there's a mess on the floor. Since we just ate I won't go into details. Later, when he comes down from his shift, he wants to know why I ain't cleaned it up. I say I ain't cleaned it up because I ain't the one that done it. He say he going to get me fired."
"Mick trash," Emma said, her eyes narrowing. "Jumped-up mackerel snapper, pimping for the rich."
"And?" Claude asked.
"And that's what happened." Al leaned back and spread his long, tapering fingers across his belly. "I got fired."
"But, but, I mean how ...," Claude started.
"Doormen got a union, Claude. Mullins big in the union. Saperstein hated to do it, I believe the man, he truly hated to do it, but he had to. Told me he'd been trying to get rid of Mullins for years, but he'd lose his job if there was a strike."
"So you lose yours," Claude said.
Al shrugged. "Gave me three months pay."
"After fifteen years," Emma said.
The waiter brought tea and fortune cookies. Al poured three cups. "They're going to oil anyway. Don't need no coal man. But listen, we're doing all right. Got the down payment and the loan for another medallion. We'll have two cabs working, everything'll be fine. Be better this way."
Claude shook his head. "You're amazing."
"What?" Al wanted to know.
"I mean, you're not even angry. That's terrible what they did. It's outrageous."
Al turned his head and looked out the window, his body still and his face expressionless. After some time he said, "How do you know I'm not angry?"
Flustered, Claude fooled with his teacup. "It's just you seem so—I mean you don't seem..."
"I'm angry. I just don't give in to it." He sipped his tea and then put it down. "Stuff happens all the time. What'd you call it? Outrageous. Outrageous stuff make you so mad you can just burn yourself up with it. You got to decide if the mad runs you, or you run the mad."
Emma leaned forward with her big arms on the table. "It doesn't mean you roll over for everything, but you control yourself."
Claude looked at his mother's calm, wide, plain face, so different now in relative repose from the red, trembling, popeyed image he remembered from his childhood. She had changed in so many respects she seemed almost a different person, more easily given to gentle laughter, more temperate in the way she moved her large body.
"You're right," Claude said. "It makes sense."
"Anyway, things are changing," Al said. "I do believe. You see those people walking up and down with signs in front of Woolworth's on Second Avenue? Half of 'em white kids. They picket Woolworth's up here for what's happening in Woolworth's down south. Now that's something new."
"The movement." Claude nodded. "People at school talked about it. Nonviolent resistance to bring about social change. It's based on Gandhi and the independence movement in India."
Emma broke open her fortune cookie, read the slip, and snorted. " 'With age comes happiness.' Thanks a lot."
Al looked at his and hesitated a moment. " 'Your children are your greatest wealth.' I guess that means I'm flat broke."
"Mine is good," Claude said. " 'A journey of a thousand leagues begins with one step.' "
"A league? What's that?"
"Three miles," Claude said, proud of himself. "Roughly three miles."
In the back of his mind he'd thought it would go the way it went in the movies. When Elizabeth Taylor's father realized his daughter was in love with Montgomery Clift, he went out of his way to be nice to the young man, welcoming him to the fold despite his origins. Claude had been moved by that detail when he'd seen the film—a powerful mix to get both the girl and a good man as a surrogate father—and had in fact gotten teary during the episode. In dozens of other films dealing with similar situations it was always the young man's skill, courage, intelligence, and basic decency that counted. Further, Claude, who had polished his manners at Cadbury, had made it a point to be always on his best behavior with Mr. and Mrs. Powers. He called them "sir" and "ma'am," never went first through a door, controlled a tendency toward excitability in conversation, and in every way attempted to act like a gentleman. He even found himself remembering some pointers from old Franz. But it had not gone well when, after half a dozen dinners at the Seventy-third Street townhouse, Mr. Powers had suggested they stay at table for cigars while the ladies repaired to the other room. Claude had refused a cigar from the box opened before him by the Filipino maid, but had accepted a second glass of wine.
"I suppose you know," Mr. Powers said when they were alone, "that Lady has turned down young MacDonald's offer of marriage."
Startled, Claude looked up. Mr. Powers's square, handsome, vapid face was without expression as he stared at his cigar. "Yes, sir," Claude said.
Arthur MacDonald was the reason Lady had come back to New York on weekends during college. Two years out of Yale Law School, he was, according to Lady, "sweet, thoughtful, dull, and a stuffed shirt." She had seen him, she said, because she'd had nothing better to do.
"The MacDonalds are old family friends," Mr. Powers said, "and Mrs. Powers and I are fond of Arthur. We're disappointed it didn't work out."
Claude didn't know how to respond, because he didn't know why Ted Powers was telling him what he was telling him. This situation had occurred a number of times, various remarks of Powers falling like lead. Surely at this moment the man could not expect commiseration, Claude thought. What does he want me to say?
"That was what we'd planned on," Powers said.
Claude's mind darted this way and that, searching for an opening but finally spinning in confusion. He said nothing.
"Lady will have many responsibilities in life." A slow puff at the cigar.
"I'm sure she will, sir." He had no idea what the man meant.
"Arthur could have helped her. He understands those kinds of things."
Claude could only look at his wine glass.
"Now what kind of responsibilities do you figure you'll have?" Powers asked. A trace of Montana had crept into his speech. He'd said something between "figure" and "figger." Lady had not given Claude much information about her father. She
spoke of him rapidly and scornfully as a dimwitted self-pitying bully (Claude had felt a mixture of shock and glee at her words) and presented his history as if it were of no importance. He'd been born on the largest cattle ranch in Montana, which had been held by his family for generations, had "grown up in the saddle," come east to go to Dartmouth, where a large donation from his mother had assured his acceptance, met Linda, married her, and done nothing since, according to Lady, except for a soft officer's job in London during the war. "That man is nothing. The most important thing he does is cook dinner on the maid's night off."
"But doesn't he have a job?" Claude had asked.
"He has an office. He keeps track of family investments. Does the income tax. It's a fraud."
Somehow Claude could not believe it was that simple. He looked down the long table. "My responsibilities will have to do with music. I should tell you about that." He had been surprised by a household so completely empty of music—no phonograph, no radio except in the kitchen, no instruments of any kind with which to break the silence. He'd never heard anyone so much as hum a tune within these walls. To do so would have seemed almost disrespectful. So Claude went slowly and carefully with Mr. Powers, telling him how he'd started with Mr. Weisfeld as a child, describing his other teachers and what he'd learned from them, emphasizing the importance of practice, scales, exercises, and a daily routine, waxed eloquent (he thought) on the mysterious power of music to move both the mind and the soul, and told of his ambitions as a player and composer. Everything he said felt remarkably sound, remarkably good, and even exciting in the abstract. He felt himself flushing with emotion.
