Evergreen (46 page)

“Mr. Friedman, I don’t want to wrangle this out in court. I’m too busy, and I’m sure you are too.”

Yes, and it’s too ugly to be brought out in the open, Joseph thought, still not speaking. He was very, very tired and angry with himself for being hurt. What, after all, was new or surprising about this conversation? He ought to have known better.

Mr. Lovejoy, too, was struggling with anger. His voice rose ever so slightly. “If you’re not satisfied with two thousand we can talk it over.”

Joseph looked up from his vision of faces: first Anna’s, then Iris’, even Maury’s and lastly, strangely, Eric’s: a face
he could only imagine, which had been taken from him by just such a man, very likely, as this one: this thin man, gaunt almost, wearing the ascetic expression of some figure in an engraved historical tableau, wearing that and a blue silk foulard tie.

“I’m not to be bought off,” he said softly. “I want the house.”

Mr. Lovejoy rose and loomed above the desk. Joseph looked up at him. He was the tallest man he had ever seen.

“Is that your final word, then, Mr. Friedman?”

“It is.”

Mr. Lovejoy walked to the door and turned back. “You ought to know,” he said, “that in all my dealings with your people, all my life, I have found them baffling, difficult and stubborn. You’re no exception.”

“And for two thousand years in our dealings with your people we have found you the same, and worse.”
I shall go home and tell Anna that the tension between us could have been cut with a knife. No, of course not; I shan’t tell Anna anything at all
.

Mr. Lovejoy’s hand was on the doorknob. Such cold eyes he had, gray as the North Atlantic in the winter: deep, deep, cold and gray. He bowed slightly, then turned and went out, shutting the door without sound behind him, as a gentleman should.

Joseph was still at his desk when Miss Donnelly came in with her hat on.

“Is it all right for me to go home, Mr. Friedman? It’s after five.”

“Yes, yes, go ahead.”

“Is there anything the matter? I thought perhaps—”

He waved his hand. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just thinking.”

Anna’s eyes. When she didn’t know he was watching her, he could catch a look in them, as if she were seeing things other people didn’t see. Mourning eyes, and wondering; eyes that could lighten so quickly into laughter. Quality, his father used to say. You can always tell quality. And
this man says he doesn’t want her living on his street. His fury mounted.

I’m going to have that house if it’s the last thing I do.

Painters and masons were still working when, in early September, they moved in so that Iris could start the school year. She had been fortunate to get a position as a fourth-grade teacher in what they later learned was the best school in the area. It was not what she had wanted. She wanted, she said, to teach poorer children whose need was greater. If she could have had her way she would have liked to teach on the lower East Side, or even Harlem.

Joseph groaned. “It’s taken most of my life to get away to a place where there was no chance of being pulled back down there. I could take all the bathrooms out of this house so you’d get the feel of Ludlow Street, if you want.”

He was the first to admit that his humor wasn’t humorous, although Anna laughed. But Iris looked exasperated, and Anna’s laugh turned to a sigh.

Oh, Iris was so earnest! She had no real joy in anything, just seemed to stand apart, watching and making her skeptical, acerbic comments. She thought the neighborhood too polished, too self-consciously expensive, and the children she taught reflected the houses they lived in. She disapproved of the things Anna was having done to the house.

“I liked it the way it was,” she said, as the kitchen took new form with stainless steel, white porcelain and dark red tile.

“You can’t mean that!”

“Naturally I don’t mean the dirt. But what you’re making is like something in a magazine.”

“That’s what I’m taking it from. A magazine,” Anna said firmly.

It was the the first time in her life that she could really have what she wanted. The costly pseudo-French furniture which they had been living with all these years had been Joseph’s choice. The odd thing was that when at last she had gotten rid of it and the second-hand men had carried it
out of sight with its gilded curlicues, painted flowers and bulbous legs (as if it had rheumatoid arthritis, Anna had used to think) she had felt a pang. They had gone through so much living with these tables and chairs! And when they took the sideboard which Maury had once gouged with his toy hammer she had turned away. (Only the little white bed from Iris’ childhood room had gone with them and was wrapped now in the attic of this house, although Iris didn’t know it. She would have understood what Anna was still hoping for.)

Joseph had told her to buy what she wanted, and she was doing so, spending far less than he would have spent. She’d furnished the dining room at an estate auction in the neighborhood, with a long, plain pine table and an enormous Welsh dresser.… These high rooms needed massive pieces and massive pieces were old; they didn’t make them anymore for the cramped spaces of this century. There were flowers all over this house: clustered on the carpet in the library, scattered in blue and white bouquets on the walls of an airy bedroom. Geraniums in wooden tubs stood at the front door.

It was beginning to take on the look she had striven for, the look of a family which had lived long in one place and slowly collected its possesions through the years. (Hadn’t she lived once in a house like that?
This silver has been in my family since before the Revolution
, Paul’s mother said.) A false impression? Of course! But so much of life is bound to be false.… And middle-class? Oh-so-genteel, so understated, so English-countryside! Such a house for Joseph and Anna, once of Ludlow Street! And why not? If they liked it, and were comfortable with it? And she had done it well. If it didn’t look like this when the original owners lived in it, then it ought to have.

The one concession to Joseph, who was far too busy these days to care about anything else, was the hanging of her portrait over the mantel in the living room. No, two concessions: the other was the gilded clock, which was to go under the portrait.

“I just don’t like meeting myself every time I walk into that room,” Anna objected, to no avail. About the clock she said nothing.

She unpacked the silver candlesticks, clutching them in her fists for a moment, feeling them before putting them on the dining-room table. The places they had seen before this one! The shelf on Washington Heights, because there had been no dining room table there, wrapped in a blanket for the ocean crossing. She could remember her mother saying the blessing over them, but where were they kept during the week? She thought and thought, straining herself to remember, and could not. And before that they had stood in the houses of a grandmother and an unknown great-grandmother. Her own mother had died before Anna had thought to ask about those other women, or had even cared about knowing. So now she would never know.

When everything else was in place, Anna unpacked her books. She took long afternoons arranging them on the shelves in sections according to the subject: art, biography, poetry, fiction. Under those headings, she arranged them again in alphabetical order according to author.

Here Iris gave approval. “You really have the makings of a library. I’d no idea we had so many.”

“Half of them have been stacked away in barrels and boxes all these years.”

Iris looked at her, Anna thought, with curiosity. “You’re really happy, aren’t you, Ma?”

“Yes, very.” (It’s a thing you learn and cultivate, this “happiness.” You count what you have and are grateful for it. And if that sounds pompous, I can’t help it.) And, not wanting to ask, yet not able to refrain from asking, “I hope you are too, a little, Iris?” The question came out almost like a plea.

“I’m all right. I’m better off than nine-tenths of the rest of the world.”

Quite true. But it was not the answer Anna had wanted.

If only she would make more friends! There had been two or three young women who taught at her school in
New York whom she saw regularly. They used to go to theatre and lunch together on weekends. But now even these few were lost to her unless she wanted to go into the city every week. Mostly now she stayed at home playing the piano, reading or correcting papers. No life for a person of twenty-seven.

She didn’t stop and talk to people. She’d nod and go walking on; Anna had seen her do it often enough. But you needed to make an effort; people didn’t just drop down the chimney and seek you out! On the Broadway block where Anna had done her shopping for all those years she had known everybody; generations of roller-skating kids, the shoe repair man, the butcher. Hadn’t the butcher had a nephew just out of Columbia Law School, and asked for Iris’ telephone number to give to him? But when Anna had mentioned it Iris had been furious.

She had tried, since moving here, to get her out to some of her own activities. There was a very active group of women at the temple sisterhood, some of them even younger than Iris. But, naturally, they were all married. There were the League of Women Voters and the Hospital Guild, which was right now raising funds for a new wing. Anna liked that sort of thing, had done it often enough in the city. People said she had a talent for making these fund raisers a success, for getting the people to come and finding speakers who could hold their attention. It wasn’t hard; you just put a smile on your face, let people know you were available to work and you could be busy every day. It was almost a challenge to move into a new community and see how quickly you could make a place for yourself!

“You must have won the popularity contest,” Iris remarked one afternoon when, on arriving home from school, she found a ladies’ meeting just breaking up. The way she said it, and she had said it before, was odd: in part it was an accusation, in part a question.

Anna had tried the simple answer often enough:
When you’re friendly to people they’re friendly to you
. But it had
produced no results, except perhaps irritation on Iris’ part And anyway, it sounded like some scout maxim or else one of those pious declarations that used to be embroidered on samplers or printed and hung over the boss’s desk in an office. So she fell back on lame humor.

“My red hair, no doubt.” And kept it at that.

If it hadn’t been for all these friends or acquaintances, whatever you wanted to call them, the house would have been unbearably empty. Empty rooms were the hazard of middle age. After the birds have flown the nest, et cetera. And if there had never been a nestful at all?

Mary Malone was distressed about her son Mickey, who’d been in Hawaii during the war and had gone back there to live. But she still had the rest of them nearby, not to speak of the grandchildren already born and yet to come! While I, while we—

More than once Anna had thought of getting into the car with Joseph, driving up to that town and knocking at the door: “We’ve come to see our grandson,” they’d say. And then what? No, it couldn’t be done in the face of those people’s refusal. The child would be the one to suffer. It couldn’t be done. Someday, when he is older, people said, someday hell want to see you. Yes, after all the lovely years of his childhood were past, he might, perhaps, come to them. A stranger, come out of curiosity or God knows why else.

On days like that Anna would need to be active, to work with her hands. She would go down into the kitchen and help Celeste with the cooking. Celeste had represented herself as a “good plain cook,” but had turned out to be more plain than good. Anna was just as glad that the cooking hadn’t been taken out of her own hands.…

She hadn’t wanted anyone living in the house in the first place. With three adults, two of them gone all day, they could have done very well with a woman to come in once or twice a week to clean.

But Joseph had been firm about it. “This enormous
house? No, you’re to get someone and without delay. I insist,” he’d said.

And so Celeste had come to them. She was a large, dark brown woman whose presence was marked by a loud voice that laughed whenever it wasn’t singing sorrowful hymns. She had come north from Georgia for no reason that she ever disclosed, leaving behind her a vague family: children? Husband? She never told them and, after one unsuccessful attempt, they never asked her.

She was to live in their house as long as they did and know them perhaps better than they knew themselves.

During their second autumn, before full dark, Joseph came driving home from the railroad station and was startled by something at the side of the road not far from his house. He backed the car up to look again.

It was a small dog, lying in tall grass. He leaned out of the car. The dog raised its head an inch or two and fell back. Its chest and one of its legs were soaked in blood.

He’d never been very useful around blood or pain and he knew it. Maybe he ought to leave the dog and telephone the police when he got home. But in the meantime some other car might come along and kill it or just mangle it some more. He shuddered and looked again. It was a little white dog with a sheep’s face, the Lovejoys’ dog. He knew nothing about dogs and really didn’t like them. But he remembered this one because when they had seen it on the Lovejoys’ lawn Anna had exclaimed over the sheep. Then Iris had looked in a book—leave it to Iris to look things up—and told them it was a dog, a Bedlington terrier.

Would it bite if he were to pick it up? He couldn’t leave it there like that. It raised its head again, or tried to, and he heard its whimper. No, he couldn’t leave it there like that. He got out of the car. There was no cloth, nothing to lay it on. He took his coat off. If the spots didn’t come out it couldn’t be helped. The dog whimpered again when he picked it up, feeling clumsy and sick with pity for it.

He drove up the hill and turned into the double driveway of the Lovejoy house. A maid answered the bell, and in the hallway behind her he heard a woman’s voice.