Augusta Played (14 page)

“Phil?”

“Pick it up.” She turned the television down.

“Hello?”

“Norman Gold?”

“Yes,” he said, “this is Norman Gold. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking at this ridiculous time of night when I happen to be having a fight with my wife?” He said this with his eyes locked to Augusta's.

“This is Birdie Mickle.”

“Oh.” He whipped away from Gus's gaze in a hurry.

“Do you know what you're doing to your father, Norman? You're breaking his heart. I just thought somebody should let you know.”

“Uh,” he said, looking again at Gus, “I can't talk now.” He hung up hastily. Gus was still staring at him. Her eyes were narrowed.

23

T
WEETIE
WAS
SLEEPING
with his head tucked under his wing.

As Gus lay under the cover, wearing Norman's shirt while he watched the end of the movie, she was wondering if what they'd had could be called a love-out. Then the darkness swept over her, and she fell into a dreamless sleep. It seemed to her that she did not wake entirely, when morning came; she was not one hundred percent conscious. Some part of her spirit stayed sleeping, unwilling to rise and shine on Eighty-eighth Street.

There were days when her spirit, this part of it, tossed and turned, as if dreaming, but most of the time full consciousness belonged solely to her musical self; it was bright and lively, quicksilver, full of flash and cool lights. A certain still shadow, like the pattern of green leaves on a polished marble surface, began to overlay the musical part of her self, but no one found anything inappropriate in this; it was a natural development, a heightening, paradoxically, of brilliance. It had nothing to do with the part of her that was sleeping.

There was a routine now, a daily rhythm. They had quit fighting. To Norman, it seemed as if they had been jockeying for emotional space and now had reached an accommodation. The fact of his being married no longer interfered with his mental life so much. In fact, his favorite day of the week was the one which had formerly been his least favorite, Sunday. On Sunday mornings, they ate pancakes at a pancake house, bought the
Times
and returned to the apartment to loll on the big bed and read. They hung Tweetie's cage in front of the windows so he could enjoy the sunshine. As the weather began to turn warm, they went for long Sunday afternoon walks along Riverside Drive. Gus wore one of her white blouses and a red mini-jumper, and the wide wings of her wavy hair, wind-lifted above the temples, sparkled in the sun like the rippling, twinkling surface of the Hudson. Norman put his arm around her and felt rapturous, knowing that he had a place in the world and someone to share it with, knowing that she belonged to him and needed him.

Gus, too, felt that she was increasingly dependent on him, and though she tried now and then to pull back, there seemed little point in it. If she was half asleep, there was a reason for it. In that submissive, spiritually quiescent, inward-yawning, poppy-smotherous state, she drifted in and out of daily life, waking now and then to find herself in Norman's arms, and feeling for him that immensely deep half-fearful involvement one feels in a dream, bereft of any sense of self. She could look at him and feel her head spin—an attraction even more sexually powerful than she had experienced before their marriage. And the more Norman talked to her, explaining herself to herself, the more she needed to hear him talk—it was like a drug, replacement therapy for the attention she had sacrificed in marrying, and she depended on him for her fix. None of these terms was to be taken literally—Gus and Norman learned from television about Haight-Ashbury and psychedelic trips, and Phil Fleischman gave them the latest gloss on “Rock-a-bye, Baby,” but all of this was merely fallout from the decade they happened to be living in. Norman and Augusta Gold, in their room on Eighty-eighth, watched the world on television but lived their own lives independent of the media—when they could.

There was, of course, the one area in her life where Gus remained totally alert: her music. She kept, as always, to her practice schedule; even more than always, she kept to it, working toward a debut in less than two years' time. Her constant playing drew out the two dwarves. They were extremely well-tailored dwarves. Their names were Tom and Cyril. Cyril was English. Tom was an actor, and they had met when he was studying drama in London. Cyril illustrated children's books. They were both shy and reclusive, but Tom had a way of charging at the world, and of taking charge; actually, it was only an extension of his stage personality. The real Tom was gentle, easily embarrassed, chronically anxious, and so easy to rag that no one dared to do it to him. Cyril explained all this to Gus one day when Tom was at an audition. Generally, Tom and Cyril were both at home, in the apartment across the hall, and one day they had followed the music down the hall, knocking timidly on the door to ask if they could come in to listen. So Gus practiced while Tom and Cyril sat at her feet, holding hands, on the floor or on the bed, and sometimes she went across to their apartment for lunch. Cyril made salmon salad sandwiches and lemonade. He vastly enjoyed doing this, and fussed over the linen napkins in their bamboo napkin rings. Their apartment had a finished look, a polished put-together and cared-for look, but Gus's and Norman's still kept its quality of impermanence. There was no money to buy furniture with. There was no point in fixing up the kitchen, which belonged to the cockroaches anyway, and if they had, there would still have been no way to erase the fact that this had previously been Norman's bachelor apartment. Gus wondered occasionally how many girls Norman had made love to in this room. All over New York, there were these islands of shelter, thousands, hundreds of thousands of living-holes, like water-holes, in which people lived and died and passed on their knowledge to the next generation, but Gus found it difficult to foresee spending years in this room of Norman's, although it glowed like garnet and sapphire. She missed her leaf pictures.

Norman took care of their finances, such as they were. After he told her not to worry about money, just work up a program, she did exactly that. She didn't know precisely where they got the money to live on, but his fellowship was substantial, and she knew that sometimes he simply didn't pay bills. She wondered also, from time to time, how much she owed the telephone company for the new phone he had had installed in her name—but it didn't matter as long as he paid it, and although she was from North Carolina and would never have considered reneging on bills a reasonable way to live, she had been in New York long enough to realize that if she objected, everyone for miles around (meaning Norman) would say she was sweet and accuse her of being conventional. Taking Con Ed and Ma Bell for a ride was justifiable self-defense. She did not entirely disagree, but she was afraid of getting caught. In a way, she admired Norman's temerity in these matters—it seemed to her a strictly masculine trait. Authority figures did not distress him.

She knew Norman's mother had helped them out with a hundred dollars. A letter had come, addressed to them both, when Norman was out, and Gus had opened it; there was a hundred-dollar bill inside, and a note saying it was to help them get started with. “I would send more,” it said, “but I had to steal this from Sid's wallet. He's never let me have a checking account of my own. It's because my father was a rabbi. Sid has always felt it was his duty to see that nothing corrupted me, such as money. My feeling is that he owes you this for being such a stiffnecked old fool. Spend it in good health.
Shalom.”
The note was signed “Esther.” Gus sat down at the long table and wrote a thank-you letter. The address in Brooklyn was printed on a stick-on label. She tried to make her letter casual, as if she had not been the cause of a total breach between father and son, father-in-law and husband, husband and son. She addressed the letter to “Mrs. Esther Gold” and left off the return address, in case Mr. Gold should see it. Then she mailed it.

She gave Norman the money and his mother's letter, but she didn't tell him that she had written to his mother. Gus wasn't supposed to exist for either of his parents. From time to time, Gus begged Norman to make it up with his father; now that she knew he wasn't going to get her debut money from him, she thought Norman should make every effort to repair the relationship. What if the old man died with this chasm unbridged? But Norman was adamant. He had said he wouldn't have anything to do with his father until his father acknowledged her as his wife.

“Don't you feel bad about never seeing your father?” Gus asked. “You said he was”—she looked around for a way to say this—“getting on.”

Norman couldn't very well tell her that he was seeing his father once a week for dinner, the night he was ostensibly working late at Columbia, and that it was his father's money which was largely bankrolling them. So he said, “He's old enough to act like a human being. It's not my fault he's infantile.”

“But suppose he died without your ever seeing him again?”

“That's what he wants,” Norman said, chafing. “That's the whole point of disowning somebody. Now look, do you mind if we change the subject?”

When Esther wrote to thank Gus for her thank-you note, Gus answered in secret again. Before long, she and her mother-in-law were maintaining a regular correspondence, though they had never met. Neither of the husbands knew anything about it. Sid naturally was at his office or in chambers when the mail was delivered in Brooklyn, and Norman was usually at Columbia when it arrived on Eighty-eighth Street. Gus would put her flute down long enough to collect the mail from the box in the wall at the foot of the stairs, and then when she was ready to resume her practicing, Tom and Cyril, both late risers, would come across the hall to join her.

All this time, the one part of her spirit continued to sleep.

Norman gave her the money to make a down payment on Town Hall for her debut in 1968. It would cost a couple of thousand dollars, but Norman swore he would have the money.

(Norman's original intention had been to save the money he was receiving weekly, the weekly payments being both a chance for him to eat decently and an excuse for his father to see him, but the money dribbled away toward this and that; in the summer, for example, there was no fellowship money.

Norman wasn't worried; as Mario's mother had said, there would be more. It wasn't as if this was abstract knowledge; it had its analogue in his own experience. In his childhood, when he spent his sixty-dollar allowance at F. A. O. Schwarz's, he could always get another sixty dollars to tide him over until the next month. He had taken care of the down payment, and the rest could wait. The important thing was that Gus was booked.)

When Gus wasn't practicing or taking a lesson or swimming, she read Norman's books, many of which, she discovered, three or four or five years earlier had belonged to the library… She did this even though there were times when she was tempted to sink onto the bed in front of the television at noon and let the rest of the day unfold unseen. There was not a whole lot of housecleaning she could do—the cockroaches held dominion in the kitchen and the bathroom was crumbling, and that left only the one room. It still seemed to her that marriage had left her with a great deal of time on her hands, even with a recital program to learn, but whenever she brought up the idea of her going to work, Norman hit the ceiling. She didn't dare push it any farther, for fear of offending his masculinity. His counter-suggestion was that she might start cooking, but she was not about to use that kitchen any more than necessary. Furthermore, something in this suggestion offended her—her what? Not her femininity, since to cook dinner for a husband was presumably feminine (even Cyril conceded that); but she had not got married in order to take up cooking. Then she thought again: maybe it
was
her femininity that was bruised. She would not have minded cooking if she had known how to, but her mother, the keypunch operator, had always refused to tolerate her mistakes in the kitchen. Her mother said that Gus had more important things to do, and certainly she meant it; but she also meant that
she
had more important things to do than teach Gus how to cook. The result was that Gus, searching dutifully according to the Protestant ethic to fill every waking moment significantly, read not one but all of Norman's books, arriving finally at the Thayer biography of Beethoven.

24

O
NE
MORNING
, while she was still in the middle of the Thayer biography of Beethoven, Gus came back to the room from downstairs with the mail, having been joined by Tom and Cyril along the way, just in time to slip the unopened letter from Norman's mother into the book before Norman himself raced up the stairs, shouting her name. “What are you doing here?” she asked, when he reached the top.

“Aren't you glad to see me?” He wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt sleeve.

“Of course!”

He laughed. “It's all right, Gus, you don't need to look so earnest. I believe you.”

“Why shouldn't you believe me?”

Tom said, “Maybe we'd better leave.”

“Yes, I think we should do,” Cyril said.

“No,” said Norman. “You just got here, I saw you. Stay.”

“They came over to listen to me practice,” Gus explained.

“Well, don't let me stop you. We'll all listen.”

“Norman, I don't think—”

“How are you going to give a concert if you can't play to your own husband?” He was looking at her expressive lip, the high bare brow revealed by the scarf that pulled her thick hair back from her face, the polite, Gentile nose. He was proud of her; it satisfied him deeply to be able to refer to himself as her husband, especially in front of other people.

“Okay,” she said, smiling, and picking up the flute. “Here goes—”