Extreme Magic (13 page)

In her grandmother’s room, she flipped the light switch on and off just long enough to see the odd note of her own sprigged flannel gown on the huge bed. The room, shrouded in dust-covers since its owner’s death, had the reserve of disuse. Ordinarily Hester would have tried the locks of the trunks which held the vestees of
broderie anglaise
and the threadlace shawls, and run a scuttling finger through bureau drawers still full of passementerie rejected by the raiding relatives six months ago. Tonight, she had begun to understand the mechanics of desecration. She stepped out of her clothes and into the nightdress, feeling as strange here as on the one night she had spent in the hospital. Crouched down under the comforter, she gripped her ankles with her hands. Burrowing her head into the blackness between her knees, listening to the purling of her own breath, she slept.

Sometime during the night she woke, her heart hammering up from a dream in which two hands, smooth, anonymous and huge, emerging wrist upward from mist, wrestled with one another, the great fingers twining in silent, marble struggle. From beneath a coverlet of stone, she waited for the mushrooming spaces of the dream to settle and ebb. Through the open door of the bathroom connecting with her parents’ bedroom, she heard their voices, locked and vying.

“No!” said her mother, in a whisper as long-drawn as a scream. “I won’t let you have it. What should be kept for your own children. To let it go down the family drain, like all the rest.”

“By God,” said her father’s voice, “how would you have it, except for me? How many women are there who can buy ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock out of their household allowance?”

“Sixteen years,” said her mother, still in that shuddering whisper. “Licking their backsides. Being the
Ausländer.
Being the responsible one. Carrying the bedpans to your mother, so your sisters could visit, and drink cream…And the miles and miles of fine words, of fine
feelings
that the Elkins have such a talent for—as long as someone else underwrites them…Someone crass—like me.”

“No one asked you to martyr yourself. Who do you think I work for, if not for you and the children?”

“For anyone who gets to you first with a few cheap words to make you feel big Ike. For anyone who will say ‘dear Joe.’”

“Now listen, Hattie—”

“You corrupt people,” said her mother, her voice rising. “Because you are too weak to refuse them.”

“For the last time…”

“No!” said her mother. “Not this time,” the words pulling from her as if she spun them one by one from a pit of resolve. “Not if you go down on your knees.”

“God, what kind of woman are you, to make a man abase himself so? Over
money,”
said her father, his voice ratchety and breathy.

“Family of leeches, leeches,” intoned her mother. “Sister Flora’s husband can’t get a job in anyone else’s business, but dear Joe will give him one. Sister Amy can’t live with her rotter of a husband, but she can talk about his aristocratic Leesburg connections, as long as dear Joe will help her out. And the bookkeeper you won’t accuse of stealing from you, because he is your sister-in-law’s brother. Even your brother’s widow, that low Irish, complaining about the settlement you gave her. What was he but a shoe salesman until he brought her from Chicago, and dear Joe gave him the factory to manage. Fine manager.”

“Leave the dead alone!” Her father’s voice had an empty sound. There was a pause, in which the edges of silence rubbed together.

“Ask the dead for your collateral,” said her mother.

From beneath the stone coverlet, Hester heard that last, faceless word sink into the quiet. After a time, someone shut the connecting door.

In the hollow of the bed, the dream waited to grow again. With an effort, she pushed up the rim of stone, and slipped out of bed. Dragging after her the comforter, suddenly light and threatless in her hand, she felt her way down the corridor to Kinny’s room. Always in a state of embattled flux, even packing day had scarcely dislodged it from the norm, and its shadows had the clutter of homeliness.

She sat on the edge of his bed and drew the comforter around her, nestling toward him, feeling him warm and insensate beside her, smelling of boy-sweat and grubbiness, and infinitely removed. From behind them, the moiling quarrel between her parents pierced through her, past her, into the world beyond. All of it had been known, but she could now see, as never before, the exact angle of its interception. On the one side stood her mother, the denying one, the unraveler of other people’s façades, but resolute and forceful by her very lack of some dimension; on the other side stood her father, made weak by his awareness of others, carrying like a phylactery the burden of his kindliness. And flawed with their difference, she felt herself falling endlessly, soundlessly, in the gulf between.

On Kinny’s shoulder, rounded in sleep, a lozenge of light wavered. She put out her hand hopefully, but she had lost the trick of playing with such semblances. She tried to cry, but could not summon that childish scald. Though she could not name the bird now hovering, she knew its nature. Slowly the bird descended, and chose. She began to weep the sparse, grudging tears of the grown.

S
OME TEN YEARS AGO
when I was for the first time in London—when, as a rather elderly innocent abroad, I was for the first time
any
where outside New York City except Rochester, Elmira, Binghamton, the Eastern Shore, a few summer resorts in New England and, at the age of twelve, Asbury Park, New Jersey—I attended a semi-diplomatic dinner party at which, after we had all drunk considerable amounts of several delightful wines, one of the ladies present suddenly peeled off her blouse.

Since the other guests, though moist and perfervid, were still upright in their chairs and conversation, the incident caused, even in that imperturbable company, a certain silence. Chitchat, suddenly quenched, faded off into one of those pauses where isolated sentences stand out sharply. The man on my left, whom I had placed tentatively as either a connoisseur of heraldry or a baiter of Americans, had been lecturing me on the purity of lineage maintained by German nobility up to the last war. “Where else,” he had just inquired, “can one find, even now, a person whose line shows sixteen quarterings?” Then he stopped short, as if contradicted by circumstance. Headily I reassured myself that quite without knowing it—and in the first week too—I must have scaled one of those dizzily international heights of society so often promised the provincial: a set so patrician that queens had no legs, emperors might be clothed exactly as they said they were, and ladies appeared in their quarterings without shame.

She was an exceedingly pretty young woman of about twenty-five with masses of blond hair arranged ingénue, and a pair of truly enormous blue eyes swimming in some Venus-lymph, clear natural nacre in which a man, or indeed any onlooker, might well sink. Words like “truly” came inevitably to mind as one regarded them. As I did so, they spilled over pellucidly. Casting a reproachful look at her partner (later it was understood that he had dared her), turning down the corners of a lovely mouth rosied with wine and—though one hated to think it—stupidity, she gazed at us, clutching the discarded portion of her costume, then hung her head and let fall on her lavishly ruffled
broderie anglaise
corselet two neatly schooled tears.

“Why, Lady Catherine!” our host said at once, and rising, he went round the table to her and poured her more wine, murmuring what I thought to be “How very sporting!” and capping it with—as he raised his own glass—“Bravo!”

Other gentlemen took up the plaudit. Lady Catherine, shyly consoled, raised her head, and I remembered her patronymic, ducally familiar even to me: one of her ancestresses, whom she was said to resemble, had been a wife of Henry the Eighth. From her round eyes two more pearls dropped, but this time surely with retrospective art—I wondered whether Henry, watching her ancestress’ head fall, might not have thought to himself, “None of my other wives looked that good upside down.”

What happened next I can only recount, not explain. It is true that, while we were only fourteen at table, the number of empty bottles ranged testimonially behind us must have totaled more than twice that. I have a vague impression that the male applause may have attained an ethnic intensity. Also that our host, bending over Lady Catherine, was assuring her that she looked smashing, and rather more respectable than the portrait of his grandmother as lady in waiting to Queen Alexandra. And that she, though retaining a disconsolate posture, was looking smug. What I know for sure is that when I next glanced at our hostess—a bishop’s daughter—she too had peeled.

“She’s upset the gravy boat, Mother!” I murmured delightedly, but of course no one paid any attention to me, or would have understood the reference if they had. No one there was likely to have heard of Mrs. Potter Palmer, much less of my mother. I shall shortly explain—for the benefit of readers who, although they may have caught the allusion to American social history, cannot possibly know anything of mine. But first let me complete the
mise en scène
of a moment in which were to be brought home to me all the old saws of my girlhood—a moment of truth in which, across so much water and over the ten years of my mother’s sojourn in Mrs. Grundy’s heaven, I could at last exclaim to her, “Mother, you were right!”

Of the seven women at table, six, including myself, were wearing the version of the currently fashionable (and easily doffable) “separates” known as “evening sweaters.” There was nothing coincidental about this; the best houses were cold, even for London; rationing was still on and the English were burning an ineffectual sludge called, with their usual talent, “nutty slack.” The one exception to the sweaters was also the only one of the others who was neither chic nor pretty, a vast, untidy woman opposite me—Frau Ewig, a noted anthropologist, recently returned from Sierra Leone—whose dress, showing so many possible means of separation that the eye was unable to choose the probable, looked somewhat as if, in order to appear in it at the party, she had first chopped several natives up. She, like the rest of us, had forgotten Lady Catherine in the sight of our hostess, who sat revealed, with the air of a prioress who had removed her wimple, in a rock-pink, ten-guinea model by Berlé.

In the silence that followed I heard the clink of crystal—the gentlemen, according to their needs and natures, were either taking another drink or putting down the one they had. A muted cry of protest was heard—from Lady Catherine. I could have seconded it—for another reason. For glancing round at the other ladies, I sensed something infinitely feminine glissade from eye to eye. In prescience I closed mine. When I opened them, what I saw confirmed it. Every remaining lady—except the anthropologist and the American—had the upper part of her costume in her hand.

Now there was nothing essentially risky in the tableau before us: a number of ladies sitting, modestly swan-necked, in their foundations, is a sight familiar to every window-shopper. Besides, the temperature being what it was, I thought I could discern, between various lacy interstices, the fuzzier-than-flesh-tone of what Debenham & Freebody’s (where I bought one the next morning) called a vest. No, the riskiness is often in the eye of the beholder. And this composite eye, twelve times magnified and stern as that of a nudist group eyeing the indecency of a visitor’s clothing, was now fixed on my pied vis-à-vis and on me. Leave me there now, while we make our way back—by gravy boat and a sneaky trail of safety pins—to my mother. We shall return.

Moral instruction by moral illustration has long since disappeared from the training of the young. Metaphor itself is considered untrustworthy—likely to weaken the facts of what already is a pretty slippery reality—and every good parent knows that the parable is too “punitive” by far. My childhood was full of them, from boogieman to Bunyan, my parents belonging to a generation still very sure of its facts. And my mother’s specialty was what might be called the “social” allegory. Obvious in design, single in target, it was part of the process by which she hoped to transform the unpromising grub at that very moment scratching its knee-scabs in front of her into something pretty and marriageable, destined to preside, with some of her own graces and others she aspired to, at a table even more elaborate than her own.

Under a codex possibly marked “Accidents, Dinner”—for, as will be seen, a good proportion of my mother’s tales revolved on accident—reposed Mrs. Potter Palmer. Famous arbiter of bygone Chicago society, she may be the model for performances slightly more rarefied than the one I know her for—as for me, I see her only in the attitude of one. Eternally she presides at her exalted dinner table, from whose foot, in the worm’s-eye view of my mother’s imagination, she is all but obscured by the gravy boat suited to her station—to my mind about twice the size of our largest tureen. In her historic moment she knows nothing of us, but all is open to posterity—hovering above her now like helicopters, like damsel flies, we see all. Then it happens. Far down the length of the gilt-encrusted table—exactly center I make it for drama—a guest jars a servingman’s wrist. A great gout of gravy erupts on the cloth.

My mother pauses; I return her look of high seriousness. Extrasensory perception or what you will, with not a word said between us, our images of that cloth are the same. As a superb embroiderer, my mother’s chef d’oeuvre is her banquet cloth. Loaded with eyelet, scallop, punchwork, Valenciennes, fringe and insertion, lying even now on its cardboard cylinder between sheets of preservative blue paper, five years in the making, never used and none like it in the world—yet there on that august table, with a terrible brown blot on its middle, lies its twin.

The guest hangs his head, and no wonder. In unavoidable
frisson
the other guests, well-bred as they are, avert theirs. We gloat over the dreadful moment, knowing rescue is nigh. Mrs. Palmer, whose eagle eye—exactly like my mother’s at her half-yearly dinner parties—sees everything while appearing to register nothing, pauses for a fraction in her elegant conversation. Then she makes her gesture—irreparable and immortal. I see her elbow, plump, white and shapely, a noble
fin-de-siècle
elbow suited to its duty, not covered with chicken-skin like mine. Carefully careless as Réjane, no doubt chatting gaily the while, she has swept it outward. Hail Mrs. Palmer, heroic hostess, who, in the imitation that is the ultimate of good manners, is seen now to have overturned, on that cloth, the tureen!