An Enlarged Heart (20 page)

During the years I sat thinking and staring out the window on the eighteenth floor, fissures that had long been opening began to tear. At first these seemed like rents in clouds, that would mend themselves. Some of these had to do with facts that were known to everyone, which were never spoken about, but were crucial to the life of the magazine, and enabled its dream life: Mr. Shawn's two households, the knowledge that some personas at the magazine, especially any of the persons who dealt with the world outside the magazine's offices, were invented. The world of the magazine depended on facts; without them, the magazine would float off like a hot air balloon. Facts pinned it down, but
what was real,
after all? Which life did one choose, the one on or off the page? The distinction blurred. The life one talked about, or the life one did not?

The unanswerable was the only answer. It is impossible to know
how it could have turned out, or how it might have happened differently:
for in the end, the owners of the magazine decided to sell it. That was a commercial enterprise, to be bought and sold, had occurred to almost no one, and the web of the magazine as it had existed—with its intact, eccentric inner life—perished. A corollary part of this was that Mr. Shawn was fired. He was seventy-five. A picture of him, finally, appeared in a tabloid paper, getting into a town car on Forty-third Street. He is wearing his overcoat, and his arms are raised, as if wielding off a blow. He looks like a man waking from a dream into a nightmare, or a from nightmare into a dream.

I
kept the letter from Mary McCarthy in a file in my drawer, in my tiny apartment with the leaky skylight, marked “important letters.” I felt, in a way, an affinity. When I had sat in my office and thought about women's lives she was among the women I thought about. During her marriage to Edmund Wilson, I knew, she had lived briefly in the seaside town where I spent my summers. I knew one of his children a little bit, and had once been to the house near the highway where they had lived. McCarthy had been a friend of my tutor at college. He had introduced me to her, after a lecture, in which she talked about the lawsuit Lillian Hellman had brought against her, after McCarthy had called Hellman a liar, and she said at one point, “Murder is more civilized than divorce. As usual, the Victorians were right.” I can't remember what she was referring to—one of her own four marriages? something else?—but I do know I didn't understand, then, what she meant.

After a while the blower of smoke rings moved briefly to Montreal, where he knew a girl who would be crueler to him than I could manage to be. A friend of the boy who had chased fire engines was murdered, and the murderer turned out to be someone he knew, and in despair over the end of the magazine and life in general as we imagined it would be, he moved far north, to remote country where at night he listened to hooting owls. I married the man who would be the father of my first child, a painter who spoke in short sentences, and for a little while I dissolved, as people do, into pabulum and mashed banana, and took on the task of showing the world to someone else, whose first sentence was
No wind.
I was, I think now, in a kind of shock. What did it mean to write
for the
magazine,
at that time? When I think about that I see the shape of silence, an expanding and contracting cloud, or maybe a kite, in which the right words—and these words were different for each writer, each person for whom the world in a real way was not real unless it was written down—are the knots on the kite string that both let the kite fly and keeps it tethered to earth. When I was a child my father taught me how to make a kite out of newspaper; a flying machine made of words. When I first came to the magazine, almost everyone at the office or who wrote for the magazine regularly had done so for most of their lives, and I expected to do that, too. That didn't happen. After the magazine as it had been ended, it took a long time for me to know how to think again.
How ridiculous,
it's almost possible to think now.

Many years later, on a rainy afternoon in Maine, on the Penobscot Peninsula, a friend and I tried to amuse a tribe of little girls by driving from Castine to Blue Hill to get ice cream, and we stopped at an antiques store where the girls could look at old seashells and samplers. (I had driven to Maine from Lake Placid, where I was visiting the family of the son of the man who had written about jazz for the magazine, who had since died; it was long a strangeness in my life that I often knew the parents of my contemporaries before I knew them.) In the corner of the antiques store was a high ormolu chest covered with dust. It was peculiar. There was a double set of drawers running down the front, and a label was fixed to the front of each drawer. In order to pull out the drawers, you needed to release a vertical molding that held the drawers in, by pushing a button. It was, I saw, an elaborate file cabinet. The labels, which were set into rectangular brass plates, were faded but legible. I peered closer to read them. They had been typed on what looked like an old Olympia typewriter. I recognized the font. The labels were in capitals:
HARCOURT
BRACE
,
THE
NEW
YORKER
(
GENERAL
),
THE
NEW
YORKER
(
SHAWN
),
PERSONAL
,
PARIS
,
LILLIAN
HELLMAN
,
LEGAL
(
HELLMAN
),
PERSONAL
,
PARIS
,
PRIVATE
,
CASTINE
.

The owner of the shop was nearby, and when I had collected myself, I asked about it. Yes, the chest had belonged to Mary McCarthy. I knew, didn't I, that she had lived in Castine? I did. I had walked over to see what had been her house that morning: a big yellow Federal-style house with a green lawn, a block from the harbor. There was a drawer at the top of the chest with a key in it, and I asked if I could open it. The owner told me to do what I liked, but to be careful—the chest was falling apart. I turned the heavy key and pulled out the drawer. Inside were a score of labels, detailing other categories:
SHOP
RECEIPTS
,
WILSON
,
PARTISAN
REVIEW
,
KNOPF
 …

There were no papers in any of the drawers. I found myself on the edge of tears. The smell of must and a sharp faint smell of something else, verbena or old paper, rose from the chest. The labels “
PERSONAL
” and “
PRIVATE
” had been double-typed; the effect was a warning, in bold letters. Those drawers were empty, too.

The girls were ready for ice cream, and we zipped up their slickers against the rain which was really coming down now. The air smelled like wet pine and the girls shrieked, jumping over the puddles. I had just finished a book that I wasn't sure I was going to publish, and I had it with me for my friend to read. When I came back to New York I talked about the chest, and in time, a few days after Christmas, bought for me by my husband, who I had told about it, it arrived wrapped in old blankets, the key to the drawers still in the locks. For a while it sat in the middle of the dining room, because it distressed me and I did not know what to do with it. It was a time when I was accused often by people around me of compartmentalizing. I found it difficult to answer this, or to figure out how I felt about what was, after all, a gift. Then it was moved upstairs to a room that had once used to be my study, but had become a kind of catch-all, between the room's two windows. Things accumulated on it: a piece of driftwood, a few photographs, a luna moth in a case, some old painted plates, and then more papers, until its power to wound was quelled by disorder, and it became another piece of furniture. I began to stick things in the drawers, willy-nilly. I began to realize that if I thought I had lost something I wanted to keep to myself it was probably in the chest.

Over the few years when went to lunch with Mr. Shawn at the Algonquin or the Oak Room, at the old Plaza, where I had crab cakes because I had once ordered them and Mr. Shawn always said, after that, “You like the crab cakes, don't you,” and ordered them for me, with a blush of pleasure at remembering. The conversation was the same. I would think of amusing things to tell him beforehand, because I was afraid the conversation would lag, and that silence would rise between us. After a while we would circle around to the same subject. I would mention pieces I might like to write and he would nod. I was then interested in religious communities, a subject about which Mr. Shawn was not particularly keen. I had recently met a woman who lived in a cave. He would then fold his napkin and say, clearing his throat first, “Miss Zarin, have you ever thought of writing fiction?” He believed, he said, I had a fictional turn of mind.

Sometime after that, and after Mr. Shawn had died, I read an account of that same conversation by a woman some years older than I was, and infinitely, to my mind, more glamorous, who had also written for the magazine. I think it occurred at the Oak Room, too. It was, in a way, a comfort.
Gee,
I thought,
really?
I thought about the ticking clock that became a time bomb, and secrets hidden in plain sight, and the black binders in which every word was carefully pasted down. I found myself wondering how often Mr. Shawn saw someone he wanted to talk to, in the mirror. And I thought of the story I had read so long ago, in which the story the characters were reading was the story they had asked for, scribbling themselves into a book that they read aloud to themselves as it happened.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank: Deborah Garrison and Peter Matson, Caroline Zancan and her colleagues at Knopf; Holly Brubrach, who as style editor of
The New York Times Magazine
commissioned pieces that became the beginning of this book; Karen Balliett, Martin Edmunds, Elizabeth Kramer, Bill McKibben, Suzannah Lessard, Jane Mendelsohn, Pamela Morton, Jonathan Schell, and Alice Truax, for reading early—and later—versions; Joe, Anna, Rose, Jack, and Beasie, who have given me the best part of the life written about in these pages, and The MacDowell Colony, for two residencies during two winters.