The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (8 page)

“Edgar would be freshly shaved, wearing a white shirt and feeling inexpressibly attractive. He too smelled of cologne, or of some ‘sportsman’ talc. I would immediately notice his health and vitality and feel somewhat aggrieved by these qualities. When our eyes met I imagined a subtle exchange took place which made me less than myself and gave him the loss, just as if he had taken the lion’s share from a plate of chops. I was never so tired as when I was with Edgar and he was never so energetic and content as in my presence. I held his hand for a moment, enjoying touching his short, thick fingers and I sighed deeply as it flashed through my mind that it was nice to have ‘someone’ or perhaps I meant,
anyone
.

“Although I felt a certain physical ennui, I was by nature talkative and enjoyed listening to myself much more than to him and apparently he waited expectantly for what I had to say. And yet our conversation, or more precisely my monologue, led within a half hour to intense frustration and displeasure on my part. Edgar did not respond adequately. His views seemed to me flat and impersonal. He did not suffer if he missed the last word about one of my friends, nor did he make any particularly animated contributions of his own. It wasn’t that he was bored, but that he so often had nothing to add. In the end I would demand, ‘Well, what do you think?’ and he would answer, ‘I haven’t formed an opinion. I don’t know all the facts.’

“My heart hardened and I felt feverish. We went on to something else. Edgar would sometimes tell what had happened to him during the day, a story about his colleagues perhaps, and invariably I felt he had been in the wrong, or that the most significant clue had escaped him. ‘How can that be,’ he wanted to know, ‘when it turned out perfectly in the end?’ By nine o’clock I had begun to dislike his face, which I denounced in my thoughts as immature, without distinction.”

Old flame, lost beloved — I have left out of my little “story” my abject dependence upon you! How mad I was about you, how perversely aware of my sinful enjoyment of your affection for me. How much more I
liked
you than all the persons I
admired
! I worshipped your indulgence of me. Nothing so easily unbalances the sense of proportion in a woman of artistic ambitions as the dazed love and respect of an ordinary man. I was nearly deranged with the secret sense of well-being this “impossible affair” gave me. What joy there was in my sullen returns to you!

“Edgar was kind, considerate, and honest. At school many people thought of him as one of the ‘young men,’ by which they meant to suggest he had advanced opinions. This notion was entirely inaccurate, but still it was easy enough to see why simple people thought of him as a crusader. He was the sort of man who had usual, conventional opinions about large issues and yet could turn a pure and perfect fury upon the inadequacies of the constitution of a certain state, like the state of Ohio for instance. He was a genuine, old-fashioned soul and one had only to glance at his amiable, youthful, ‘fair-play’ face to see there all the moral maxims of one’s youth. If asked what principle he most respected, Edgar would very likely have paused to consider and then have answered:
arbitration
.”

In my story I was trying to make the poor fellow look ridiculous and myself “awful but interesting.” In real life Edgar was always putting the most fearful questions to me.

“Why don’t we get married?” he naturally asked regularly.

“I’m not so sure it would be the right thing to do. We make each other very, very dull. Anyone can see that.” I was careful to give these insulting answers in a very affectionate tone, for after all the situation between us required a really exhausting amount of quick thinking on my part. I often felt I had done an honest day’s work after an evening with Edgar.

“But this
dullness
, as you call it, that is your life. Night after night.”

“Yes, it is and yet it isn’t really the whole thing.”

If Edgar’s deepest nature was in truth sturdy, sensual, mercantile, I never in my old notes gave a true idea of his physical charm. His French Gothic face of such an interesting, abstract modeling, private and serene. This face always fascinated me and whenever I looked at it I discovered Edgar’s secret strength. He was a happy young man!

Another vignette of Edgar from my old notebook:

“...as I looked through the window I saw that my solid, unaffected Edgar Mason was waiting for me. He was working the crossword puzzle in the evening paper, but I could tell he was not diverted by it. He is probably thinking about his health, I guessed. That was his single neurotic aspect — the fear of the decrepitude and suffering of old age and with it he mixed, almost as an effort to forget the first, the fear of poverty. His expectation was intimately felt. ‘It is all so hopeless,’ he often said. ‘Suppose one got sick.’

“He had great imagination about these calamities and it was unnerving to see this healthy boy suddenly weakened by his visions. ‘Yes, if you live long enough,’ I said, ‘you’ll have a fatal sickness.’

“‘That’s just it. But some people escape better than others. My grandmother lived to be ninety and was only sick for a week at the end.’

“‘But still it was the end.’ It seemed to me that he pushed himself forward to the age of seventy and that he hoped, if he worked hard enough at it, to present to the world a magnificent, death-defying physique, which showed age only by some arbitrary change like the growing of a mustache or the use of an attractive walking stick. Like Charmian in
Antony and Cleopatra
, Edgar loved long life better than figs.

“‘If you take care of yourself...’ he whispered.

“‘But everyone takes care of himself. At least most people do. It’s much more mysterious or perhaps more simple than that...’

“‘And if you have a good constitution to begin with...’ He took intense pride in the longevity of his family — that was his pedigree and ancestral vanity, the large number of obscure people on both sides who had not died young. ‘Oh, well, let’s change the subject,’ he said with determination.”

While I was composing these bits about Edgar’s wish for long life, I never thought of recording my adoration for his green Chevrolet convertible. Such a darling little car, I was always thinking, it “almost makes up for
everything
.” Sheer bliss to drive about with him. In his little green car, even his reedy tenor pleased me. But often the Chevrolet would drive us to taverns and I would have too much to drink and say to Edgar, without batting an eye, without even a flush of shame, “Where, you idiot, is my art, my spirituality, my socialism!” as if he had swiped these things out of my pocket! Even now the inventiveness of this accusation startles me.

All of this was some years ago. If now I were suddenly to run upon him again, to see his sweet brown face, his charming nose bent a little to the left, if I were to shake his hand I do not know what I would say. But I would be thinking what pleasure we have all received from someone we imagined “not quite good enough” for us.

1949

Around ten o’clock in the morning, Russell Simmons left his dingy rooming house on Pinckney Street and walked down the hill to his shop on Charles Street, in Boston. The Olympia Antique Shop (Estates Purchased, Appraisals, Repairs) was a narrow, poorly stocked shop, one of those baffling small-business operations that appear to offer little advantage or profit to either buyer or seller. Russell, opening the door, switching on the back light, showed no more interest in the business of the day than if he had been going into a subway station. He yawned, he smoked, he soon sneaked next door for a cup of coffee, idly watching the street in case Mr. Soferis, the owner of the shop, happened by. Around noontime, the morning paper read, Russell could often be seen standing at the door of the shop, staring into the street with something of the same wandering, idle vacancy of those who outside peered into his display window, looking at Toby jugs, cracked plates, pewter bowls, and worthless beads. His blank, bored stare; their blank, bored stare; pale eyes yellowed by the amber light of tulip-shaped vases; the cold glint of blackened coins; dolls in dusty nightgowns, with matted hair — of these images, covered over by the smoke of a nearly constant cigarette, were his days made. There was seldom anything interesting or attractive offered to the public by the Olympia and Russell’s efforts on behalf of his goods were of commensurate casualness. “I think it is quite old,” or “not many of them around anymore,” he would say. He did not know the first thing about “antiques,” but for the sake of appearance he added a listlessness about the matter and a general wariness concerning unworthy exertions.

Somehow the preoccupied, confused Mr. Soferis kept his shop going. The Charles Street place was one of four shops the man owned and Russell supposed the end of the year magically indicated a businesslike profit for the enterprises. After all, it was amazing what people would pay twenty-five dollars for. The pale, heavy, vague Mr. Soferis was repetitive and theoretical. His thoughts and time were taken up in the mere fact of his four Olympias; he loved the shops individually and as a group, as if they had been his four sons. The shops were his for better or for worse; he had never ceased to marvel that he, a poor Greek boy, had acquired them. Soferis allowed his business the peculiar indulgences due to the miraculous and his soul warmed to the idea of ownership as much as to its benefits, which were at best small.

For Russell, the “position,” as he called it, had come to him without effort, having been more or less handed down by his uncle, Walt Simmons, who had presided for a time over the Olympia with the same smoky languor his nephew now brought to the post. The place was only one narrow room with a windowless pantry on the right side where there was a worktable for wrapping packages, polishing pewter, rubbing silver, patching wood, and gluing bits of broken china back to cups and saucers. He was no hand at patching and for a long time had been astonished to know how hard it was to clean silver.

Mr. Soferis, double-parking out in front in his old, cluttered station wagon, came and went, loading and unloading, muttering, counting, musing. “The stuff moves faster when it is all clean and shining,” he frequently advised. Russell puffed away on his cigarette as an answer. Soferis was a natural junk man. He loved things, odds and ends, bits of junk bought by the lot. The care and display and marketing of these innumerable castoffs and leftovers was nearly as confusing to him as to Russell. Russell was honest, just as his uncle, Walt Simmons, had been honest. Mr. Soferis, having been tricked out of a few dollars here and there in his commercial life, valued the absence of theft more than the presence of energy and purpose. There were beautiful shops, inspired shops, and tricky shops along Charles Street and other parts of the Beacon Hill section of Boston, but these vivid establishments did not arouse the envy or the emulation of the owner of the four Oympias. He had his own; he trucked back and forth, breathing hard, adding and subtracting in his junk-muddled mind.

Russell did not like the work, but he liked being where he was and did not want to make a change. “Not just yet,” he would think to himself, idly. He was penniless and unskilled; he had just finished his military service, put in a year as a filling-station attendant, before this opportunity to be the “manager” of the Olympia came to him from Uncle Walt.

It was the beginning of winter, in November, when Marianne Gibbs first came into the shop. “I’m just looking around, please,” she said.

“It’s all yours, honey,” Russell said boldly. He knew which girls to hope for. This was one, he decided.

Marianne was very short, a dwarf of a girl, with a large, well-shaped head and a vaguely reproving expression. Her chin was pointed, her features were pretty at first glance, but the whole effect of her face was somewhat faded and overcast. She was well-dressed, neat, and even stylish. “She makes a good appearance,” Russell said to himself, in the language of employment applications. Her black pumps were polished, her black cloth coat was brushed, her light-blue scarf as clean as new. A rather unusual seriousness and prudence quickly revealed themselves in her nature.

“I sure go for that Southern accent,” Russell said. Marianne explained that she was from a coal-mining town in the Kentucky hills.

Russell observed her closely, taking in her modest, appealing face. He admired her without being in the least afraid of her. His manner immediately became too flashy, too ready. Confidence made him giddy. “What are you doing so far from home?” he demanded.

Marianne bit her lip, nervously. No, she was not really pretty, Russell decided, because of a look of moral anxiety and struggle. She appeared both more capable and more careworn than the girls he was used to. He felt certain she didn’t know about life, by which he meant that she didn’t know how to have a good time. This did not displease him. He was tired of tough girls. The downward curve of Marianne’s lips, her thoughtful, melancholy eyes gave him the sensation of a new experience, of something plain but engulfing. She was studying fashion designing in Boston, she said.

“Well, that bit surprises the hell out of me!” Russell said, lifting his eyebrows. He had an image of the kind of girl who went to modeling school or cared about fashions: spoiled, wide-mouthed, greedy girls, too much petted by their parents. They drove cars and wore tight slacks. The very image of such a girl made Russell feel insecure. Marianne, on the other hand, was subdued and reasonable. From the very first she seemed to look at him with approving eyes. Her neat little soul was trusting and serious.

It turned out that Marianne had a scholarship. Russell was impressed, but refrained from saying so, not wishing to give himself away too quickly. In all his life he had never had a relative or a close friend who did anything with such excellence as to be singled out for society’s special encouragement and aid. His life had been starved in a way, empty as the horizon before a bunch of poor nomads, searching in the hot dust. He had grown up on candy bars, in a noisy, affectionate, overstuffed home. A peculiar, creamy starvation, a noisy, voluble muteness, an indolent restlessness had claimed him, his family, his friends, his neighborhood, in the way a ghastly irony or trick in a folktale will claim a whole village. He had lived in a two-family house, a green-and-tan structure. His father worked on an oil-delivery truck; his older brother, Ed, worked in a Coca-Cola bottling plant; another brother, Dan, worked as a checkout man in a supermarket. When Russell was in high school these older brothers were still living at home and so there had been enough money for the family to live comfortably. They owned the expected articles of domestic life — automobile, television set, matching pieces of furniture, plastic curtains, a large refrigerator, and so on — owned them as naturally as a farmer owns his mongrel dog. And yet a deep poverty was their lot. At home at night the family had the look of puffy lethargy to be seen in prisoners. Their faces showed an odd lack of vivacity, even when they were laughing and talking, as they did a good deal. Indeed, contentment of a kind was well-known to them. The strange, full lethargy gave large stretches of peace. They were all, except Russell, who was still just twenty-three, running to fat, to an accumulation of stored, useless, enervating energy. They were living out their time, blameless, and not unusual.