Extreme Magic (7 page)

“Oh, Dad!” Sally had the necklace around her neck. She raised her arms artistically above her head, in the fifth position, minced forward, and placed their slender wreath around Grorley’s neck. As she hung on him, sacklike, he felt that she saw them both, a tender picture, in some lurking pier glass of her mind.

The door opened, and Eunice came in. She shut it behind her with a “not before the servants” air, and stood looking at him. Her face was blurred at the edges; she hadn’t decked herself out for anybody. She looked the way a tired, pretty woman, of a certain age and responsibilities, might look at the hour before dinner, at the moment when age and prettiness tussle for her face, and age momentarily has won.

“Look what I got!” Georgie brandished the knife.

“And mine!” Sally undulated herself. “Mums! Doesn’t it just
go!”
She stopped, looking from father to mother, her face hesitant, but shrewd.

“Open yours, Mums. Go on.”

“Later,” said Eunice. “Right now I think Mrs. Lederer wants you both to help with the chestnuts.”

“No fair, no fair,” said Georgie. “You saw ours.”

“Do what your mother says,” said Grorley. The paternal phrase, how it steadied him, was almost a hearthstone under his feet.

“Oh, well,” said Eunice, wilting toward the children, as she invariably did when he was stern with them. Opening the package he indicated, she drew out the bauble. Georgie rushed to look at it, awarded it a quick, classifying disinterest, and returned to his knife.

“Oo—I know how to work those! Margie’s sister has one,” said Sally. She worked it. “If that isn’t corny!” she gurgled. Eunice’s head was bent over the gift. Sally straightened up, gave her and Grorley a swift, amending glance. “But cute!” she said. She flushed. Then, with one of the lightning changes that were the bane of her thirteen years, she began to cry. “Honestly, it’s sweet!” she said.

Grorley looped an arm around her, gave her a squeeze and a kiss. “Now, shoo,” he said. “Both of you.”

When he turned back to the room, Eunice was looking out the window, chin up, her face not quite averted. Recognizing the posture, he quailed. It was the stance of the possessor of the stellar role—of the nightingale with her heart against the thorn. It was the stance of the woman who demands her scene.

He sighed, rat-tatted his fingers on a table top. “Well,” he said. “Guess this is the season the corn grows tall.”

A small movement of her shoulder. The back of her head to him. Now protocol demanded that he talk, into her silence, dredging his self-abasement until he hit upon some remark which made it possible for her to turn, to rend it, to show it up for the heartless, illogical, tawdry remark that it was. He could repeat a list of the game birds of North America, or a passage from the Congressional Record. The effect would be the same.

“Go on,” he said, “get it over with. I deserve it. I just want you to know…mentally, I’m out of the Village.”

She turned, head up, nostrils dilated. Her mouth opened. “Get it ov—!” Breath failed her. But not for long.

Much later, they linked arms in front of the same window. Supper had been eaten, the turkey had been trussed, the children at last persuaded into their beds. That was the consolatory side of family life, Grorley thought—the long, Olympian codas of the emotions were cut short by the niggling detail. Women thought otherwise, of course. In the past, he had himself.

Eunice began clearing off the bed. “What’s in those two? Father’s and Mother’s?”

“Oh Lord. I forgot Father.”

“Never mind. I’ll look in the white-elephant box.” The household phrase—how comfortably it rang. She looked up. “What’s in these then?”

“For Mother and Mrs. Lederer. Those leather satchel-things. Pinseal.”

“Both the same, I’ll bet.”

He nodded.

Eunice began to laugh. “Oh, Lord. How they’ll hate it.” She continued to laugh, fondly, until Grorley smirked response. This, too, was familiar. Masculine gifts: the inappropriateness thereof.

But Eunice continued to laugh, steadily, hysterically, clutching her stomach, collapsing into a chair. “It’s that hat,” she said. “It’s that s-specimen of a hat!”

Grorley’s hat lay on the bed, where he had flung it. Brazenly dirty, limp denizen of bars, it reared sideways on a crest of tissue paper, one curling red whorl of ribbon around its crown. “L-like something out of Hogarth,” she said. “The R-rounder’s Return.”

Grorley forced a smile. “You can buy me another.”

“Mmmm…for Christmas.” She stopped laughing. “You know…I think that’s what convinced me—your coming back tonight. Knowing you—that complex of yours. Suppose I felt if you meant to stand us through the holidays, you meant to stand us for good.”

Grorley coughed, bent to stuff some paper into the wastebasket. In fancy, he was stuffing in a picture too, portrait of Vida, woman of imagination, outdistanced forever by the value of a woman who had none.

Eunice yawned. “Oh…I forgot to turn out the tree.”

“I’ll go down.”

“Here, take this along.” She piled his arms with crushed paper. In grinning afterthought, she clapped the hat on his head.

He went to the kitchen and emptied his arms in the bin. The kitchen was in chaos, the cookery methods of
alt Wien
demanding that each meal rise like a phoenix, from a flaming muddle belowstairs. Tomorrow, as Mrs. Lederer mellowed with wine, they would hear once again of her grandfather’s house, where the coffee was not even
roasted
until the guests’ carriages appeared in the driveway.

In the dining room, the table was set in state, from damask to silver nut dishes. Father would sit there. He was teetotal, but anecdotalism signs no pledge. His jousts as purchasing agent for the city of his birth now left both narrator and listener with the impression that he had built it as well. They would hear from Mother too. It was unfortunate that her bit of glory—her father had once attended Grover Cleveland—should have crystallized itself in that one sentence so shifty for false teeth—“Yes, my father was a physician, you know.”

Grorley sighed, and walked into the living room. He looked out, across the flowing blackness of the river. There to the south, somewhere in that jittering corona of yellow lights, was the apartment. He shuddered pleasurably, thinking of all the waifs in the world tonight. His own safety was too new for altruism; it was only by a paring of luck as thin as this pane of glass that he was safely here—on the inside, looking out.

Behind him, the tree shone—that
trompe-l’oeil
triumphant—yearly symbol of how eternally people had to use the spurious to catch at the real. If there was an angel at the top, then here was the devil at its base—that, at this season, anybody who opened his eyes and ears too wide caught the poor fools, caught himself, hard at it. Home is where the heart…the best things in life are…spin it and it says I. L.O.V.E. U.

Grorley reached up absently and took off his hat. This is middle age, he thought. Stand still and hear the sound of it, bonging like carillons, the gathering sound of all the platitudes, sternly coming true.

He looked down at the hat in his hand. It was an able hat; not every hat could cock a snook like that one. From now on, he’d need every ally he could muster. Holding it, he bent down and switched off the tree. He was out of the living room and halfway up the stairs, still holding it, before he turned back. Now the house was entirely dark, but he needed no light other than the last red sputter of rebellion in his heart. He crept down, felt along the wall, clasped a remembered hook. Firmly, he hung his hat in the hall. Then he turned, and went back up the stairs.

T
HEY ALL CAME ALONG
with Eleanor and her baby in the cab to Grand Central, her father and mother on either side of her, her father holding the wicker bassinet on his carefully creased trousers. Rosalie and Helene, her cousins, smart in their fall ensembles, just right for the tingling October dusk, sat in the two little seats opposite them. Aunt Ruth, Dr. Ruth Brinn, her father’s sister and no kin to the elegant distaff cousins, had insisted on sitting in front with the cabman. Eleanor could see her now, through the glass, in animated talk, her hat tilted piratically on her iron-gray braids.

Leaning forward, Eleanor studied the dim, above-eye-level picture of the driver. A sullen-faced young man, with a lock of black hair belligerent over his familiar nondescript face. “Manny Kaufman.” What did Manny Kaufman think of Dr. Brinn? In ten minutes she would drag his life history from him, answering his unwilling statements with the snapping glance, the terse nods which showed that she got it all, at once, understood him down to the bone. At the end of her cross-questioning she would be quite capable of saying, “Young man, you are too pale! Get another job!”

“I certainly don’t know why you wanted to wear that get-up,” said Eleanor’s mother, as the cab turned off the Drive toward Broadway. “On a train. And with the baby to handle, all alone.” She brushed imaginary dust from her lap, scattering disapproval with it. She had never had to handle her babies alone.

Eleanor bent over the basket before she answered. She was a thin fair girl whom motherhood had hollowed, rather than enhanced. Tucking the bottle-bag further in, feeling the wad of diapers at the bottom, she envied the baby blinking solemnly up at her, safe in its surely serviced world.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It just felt gala. New York-ish. Some people dress down for a trip. Others dress up—like me.” Staring at her own lap, though, at the bronze velveteen which had been her wedding dress, sensing the fur blob of hat insecure on her unprofessionally waved hair, shifting the shoes, faintly scuffed, which had been serving her for best for two years, she felt the sickening qualm, the frightful inner blush of the inappropriately dressed.

In front of her, half-turned toward her, the two cousins swayed neatly in unison, two high-nostriled gazelles, one in black, one in brown, both in pearls, wearing their propriety, their utter rightness, like skin. She had known her own excess when she had dressed for the trip yesterday morning, in the bare rooms, after the van had left, but her suits were worn, stretched with wearing during pregnancy, and nothing went with anything any more. Tired of house dresses, of the spotted habiliments of maternity, depressed with her three months’ solitude in the country waiting out the lease after Dan went on to the new job, she had reached for the wedding clothes, seeing herself cleansed and queenly once more, mysterious traveler whose appearance might signify anything, approaching the pyrrhic towers of New York, its effervescent terminals, with her old brilliance, her old style.

Her father sighed. “Wish that boy could find a job nearer New York.”

“You know an engineer has to go where the plants are,” she said, weary of the old argument. “It’s not like you—with your own business and everything. Don’t you think I’d like…?” She stopped, under Rosalie’s bright, tallying stare.

“I know, I know.” He leaned over the baby, doting.

“What’s your new house like?” said Rosalie.

“You know,” she said gaily, “after all Dan’s letters, I’m not just sure, except that it’s part of a two-family. They divide houses every which way in those towns. He’s written about ‘Bostons,’ and ‘flats,’ and ‘duplexes.’ All I really know is it has automatic heat, thank goodness, and room for the piano.” She clamped her lips suddenly on the hectic, chattering voice. Why had she had to mention the piano, especially since they were just passing Fifty-seventh Street, past Carnegie with all its clustering satellites—the Pharmacy, the Playhouse, the Russian restaurant—and in the distance, the brindled windows of the galleries, the little chiffoned store fronts, spitting garnet and saffron light? All her old life smoked out toward her from these buildings, from this parrot-gay, music-scored street.

“Have you been able to keep up with your piano?” Helene’s head cocked, her eyes screened.

“Not—not recently. But I’m planning a schedule. After we’re settled.” In the baby’s nap time, she thought. When I’m not boiling formulas or wash. In the evenings, while Dan reads, if I’m only—just not too tired. With a constriction, almost of fear, she realized that she and Dan had not even discussed whether the family on the other side of the house would mind the practicing. That’s how far I’ve come away from it, she thought, sickened.

“All that time spent.” Her father stroked his chin with a scraping sound and shook his head, then moved his hand down to brace the basket as the cab swung forward on the green light.

My time, she thought, my life—your money, knowing her unfairness in the same moment, knowing it was only his devotion, wanting the best for her, which deplored. Or, like her mother, did he mourn too the preening pride in the accomplished daughter, the long build-up, Juilliard, the feverish, relative-ridden Sunday afternoon recitals in Stengel’s studio, the program at Town Hall, finally, with her name, no longer Eleanor Goldman, but Elly Gold, truncated hopefully, euphoniously for the professional life to come, that had already begun to be, thereafter, in the first small jobs, warm notices?

As the cab rounded the corner of Fifth, she saw two ballerinas walking together, unmistakable with their dark Psyche knots over their fichus, their sandaled feet angled outwards, the peculiar compensating tilt of their little strutting behinds. In that moment it was as if she had taken them all in at once, seen deep into their lives. There was a studio of them around the hall from Stengel’s, and under the superficial differences the atmosphere in the two studios had been much the same: two tight, concentric worlds whose
aficionados
bickered and endlessly discussed in their separate argots, whose students, glowing with the serious work of creation, were like trajectories meeting at the burning curve of interest.

She looked at the cousins with a dislike close to envy, because they neither burned nor were consumed. They would never throw down the fixed cards. Conformity would protect them. They would marry for love if they could; if not, they would pick, prudently, a candidate who would never remove them from the life to which they were accustomed. Mentally they would never even leave Eighty-sixth Street, and their homes would be like their mothers’, like her mother’s,
bibelots
suave on the coffee tables, bonbon dishes full, but babies postponed until they could afford to have them born at Doctors Hospital. “After all the money Uncle Harry spent on her, too,” they would say later in mutually confirming gossip. For to them she would simply have missed out on the putative glory of the prima donna; that it was the work she missed would be out of their ken.