The Rose Garden (33 page)

She looked at him stupidly, and I was surprised when she answered him. “I'm not going anywhere,” she said in her dreadful voice.

Leo spoke up. “It is snowing out, Michel,” he said.

Michel grinned at him. “Ten minutes!” he cried, and vanished.

“That Michel is a great joker, he thinks,” Leo said.

“You call him a joker?” Mrs. Dolan said loudly. “Some joker, I'll say.” But Leo ignored her, and she began rummaging in the huge leather handbag that was on the table beside her, propped against the wall. She took out a mirror and moved it about while she examined herself, her eyes, her mouth, and her earrings, and then she took out a dark red lipstick and smeared it thickly back and forth on her mouth, and afterward, while she was putting the lipstick away, she pressed her lips closely together. With her little finger, she rubbed the lipstick smooth, and tidied the corners of her mouth, and when she had finished she cleaned the color from
her finger with her dinner napkin and took a tiny sip of her brandy, and glanced at Michel's brandy, which he had not touched. After that she sat gazing at the stained tablecloth, and from time to time she pursed her lips thoughtfully at something she saw there.

There are three young girls who have been coming to the Étoile for their Sunday dinner the last few months. They share an apartment on Forty-seventh, and they all work as secretaries. Lately one of them, Betty, has been dropping in alone, early in the evening, before ten o'clock. She never comes for dinner, and she never stays after Mees Katie has gone home. Betty is about five foot two, a brown-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced girl with a pretty figure and a pretty smile, who obviously enjoys being a friendly little child among the grownups. Her winter coat is dark green imitation fur, and she wears sweaters and skirts most of the time, schoolgirl clothes. She walks in timidly, as though she is not quite sure of her welcome, and then she sits up at the end of the bar and asks for a Perrier water and drinks it very slowly, making it last. She dreams of being an actress, but I think the part she dreams of playing is the part she plays as she sits up at the bar of the Étoile, and sips her Perrier and stares wonderingly all about her. The Étoile reminds her of a waterfront café she saw once in a movie that starred Jean Gabin and that I think has now been remade to include a very young unknown actress named Betty who sits at the bar with a Perrier stealing the show, although she has nothing to say and nothing to do except be herself, poor and alone and very young. She always puts down a dollar to pay for her Perrier, but Leo seldom takes the money, and if he does take it he gives her another Perrier on the house. Once or twice Betty has sat at Mees Katie's table and helped her listen to Michel. She finds Michel very entertaining. Tonight she walked in shortly after Michel ran out. She came in expectantly, almost laughing, walking out of the
snowstorm as though she were walking into a party. She pulled off her scarf, shaking the snow from it, and as she began to unbutton her coat she looked around for Mees Katie. Leo had come to the end of the bar and was watching her, smiling.

“Where is everybody?” she cried. “Where's Mees Katie?” She sat up at the bar and Leo poured a Perrier for her.

“I'm celebrating, Leo,” she said. “This is my very first snowstorm. The office let us off at three o'clock, and I walked round and round and round, all by myself, celebrating all by myself, and then I went home and made dinner, but I got so excited thinking about the snow I just had to come out again and thought I'd come here and see Mees Katie. I thought there'd be thousands of people here. Oh, I wish it would snow for weeks and weeks. I just can't bear for it to end. But after today I'm beginning to think New Yorkers never really enjoy themselves. Nobody seemed to be really enjoying the snow. I never saw such people. All they could think about was getting home. Wouldn't you think a storm like this would wake everybody up? But all it does is put them to sleep. Such people.”

“It does not put me to sleep, Betty,” Leo said in his deliberate way.

“I wish it would snow for a year,” Betty said.

“It will take something warmer than a snowstorm to put me to sleep, Betty,” Leo said.

Betty laughed self-consciously and looked at Mrs. Dolan.

“Michel is a bad boy tonight, Betty,” Leo said, and he also looked at Mrs. Dolan. “He told this lady he'd be back in ten minutes and it has been twenty.”

“Nearly half an hour,” Mrs. Dolan said disgustedly. “Nearly half an hour.”

“He'll be back,” Betty said. “Michel always comes back, doesn't he, Leo?”

“Oh, yes, Michel comes back,” Leo said, and he put his hand on Betty's arm and leaned far across the bar and began whispering in her ear, or tried to begin whispering in her ear, because at the touch of his face against her hair she pulled roughly away and looked at him with such distaste that he stepped back. Then he went to the cash register and opened the drawer and began looking in at the money and pretending to count it. He was furious. If she had spent ten years pondering a way to express disgust, she could not have found a better way. Even if they had been alone, Leo would never have forgiven her, but the three lingering men were watching, and so was Mrs. Dolan.

Betty sat alone for a minute and then she took her Perrier and slipped down from her stool and walked over to Mrs. Dolan. Betty looked flustered, but she was smiling.

“May I sit down?” she asked Mrs. Dolan.

“Oh, please do,” Mrs. Dolan said.

Betty sat down in Michel's chair, diagonally across from Mrs. Dolan. “Michel will be back soon,” she said. “He always comes back.”

“He left me sitting here like this,” Mrs. Dolan said.

“Michel is really a sweet kind person when you get to know him,” Betty said. “He's a darling, really.”

Leo called out, “Miss Betty, you owe me sixty cents.”

Betty looked over at him in surprise.

“You forgot to pay for your drink, little girl,” he said, smiling, and he waved at Robert the waiter. Robert took Betty's dollar to the bar and brought her back her change. She had gotten very red.

“He needn't have shouted at me,” she said to Mrs. Dolan. Mrs. Dolan said nothing.

Betty began talking. “This is the first big snow I've ever seen,” she said. “I thought it would be like New Year's Eve here tonight, or something. When they first told us we were getting off early
from the office I felt it was like a party or something, but then after I walked around a bit it seemed more like a disaster, and I kept wanting to get into the spirit of the thing. I felt very left out all day. I kept walking around.”

When she fell silent, Mrs. Dolan still continued to watch her, but she said nothing. She had nothing to say, and nothing to give except her silence, and so she said nothing, and made no reply, and they sat without speaking until the silence they shared strengthened and expanded to enclose them both.

Not long ago I saw a photograph in the evening paper of a crowd of circus elephants gathered around a dying elephant, Flora, who had fallen and was lying on her side on the ground. The elephant closest to Flora was trying to revive her by blowing air into her open mouth with his trunk The newspaper story said that all the elephants in the troupe took turns trying to save their dying comrade, and the story finished by saying, “This practice is instinctive among pachyderms.”

But that practice, instinctive among pachyderms, that determination to win even a respite from death, is no more instinctive than the silence was that grew and turned into a lifeline between Betty and Mrs. Dolan, because their silence arose from a shame so deep that it was peace for them to sit in its silence, and to listen to this silence, which was only the silence of their own nature, of all they had in common. Mrs. Dolan's face grew ruminative, and Betty's profile suggested she was lost in recollections that were not unhappy.

Michel walked in, a snowman. He must have been standing out in the open, or walking, ever since he left the restaurant. He stood still just inside the door and banged the palms of his gloves together and sent a fond glance at Mrs. Dolan and at Betty, who had turned to watch him. Michel was very pleased with the entrance he had made, and he looked as though he would like to go out and come
back in again.

“Don Juan, he thinks he is,” Mrs. Dolan growled.

Michel moved to the coatrack and began unwrapping himself. He was very slow about it, and all the time he was pulling off his gloves, and unwinding his scarf, and shaking his fur hat, he faced the room as though he faced a full-length mirror, and he smiled, watching all of us, but not as he would watch the mirror. At last he stood revealed in his navy-blue-and-brown striped suit and his rings and his crinkly black hair and his bow tie, and he strolled back to his table and sat down beside Mrs. Dolan, and smiled sweetly at Betty, and picked up the cognac that had been waiting for him. When I left they were all ordering more drinks, and Mrs. Dolan had decided to switch to crème de menthe. The old Frenchman came out of his reverie and began looking unpleasantly at the three men who were chattering in English at the end of the bar, and I knew he was becoming happier. I paid my bill and left.

The self-service elevator at my hotel shivered piteously when I stepped into it, and hesitated before starting its painful ascent to the high floor where I live. That is as usual. The tiny, boxy elevator is as alien to this elegantly made hotel as the blue neon sign that winks on and off in front. A marble staircase winds all the way up through the heart of the building, and decorated windows over every stairwell still filter and color the light as they have done for more than sixty years. The fireplaces have all been blocked up long ago, but the rooms are very big and the ceilings are high and the walls shut out all sound. I looked again through the windows that give me my view of Broadway. Just below me, on Forty-eighth Street, on both sides of the street, a few small houses huddle together in the shadows, and from their low level other, newer walls rise higher and higher to the south and east, but tonight the big buildings, the giants that carry Manhattan's monumental broken skyline, were lost in fog. I could see only the little roofs below
me and their neighbors immediately beyond, all of them under smooth snow that shaped them in the dark into separate triangles and squares and rectangles and slopes. The snow on Forty-eighth Street was rumpled, but there was no one in the street and the open parking lot was empty. To the right, Broadway was still lighted up as high as the sky, but the lights shone weakly, smothered in fog, except for the dazzling band of color that runs around the Latin Quarter, a few houses away from me. I pushed open the window. The cold air rushed in, but no noise. What sound there was was drugged, as though I were a hundred floors above the street instead of only eleven floors. The wind had died down, and the snow fell thickly, falling in large, calm flakes.

I See You, Bianca

My friend Nicholas is about the only person I know who has no particular quarrel with the city as it is these days. He thinks New York is all right. It isn't that he is any better off than the rest of us. His neighborhood, like all our neighborhoods, is falling apart, with too many buildings half up and half down, and too many temporary sidewalks, and too many doomed houses with big X's on their windows. The city has been like that for years now, uneasy and not very reasonable, but in all the shakiness Nicholas has managed to keep a fair balance. He was born here, in a house on 114th Street, within sight of the East River, and he trusts the city. He believes anyone with determination and patience can find a nice place to live and have the kind of life he wants here. His own apartment would look much as it does whether he lived in Rome or Brussels or Manchester. He has a floor through—two rooms made into one long room with big windows at each end, in a very modest brownstone, a little pre–Civil War house on East Twelfth Street near Fourth Avenue. His room is a spacious oblong of shadow and light—he made it like that, cavernous and hospitable—and it looks as though not two but ten or twenty rooms
had contributed their best angles and their best corners and their best-kept secrets of depths and mood to it. Sometimes it seems to be the anteroom to many other rooms, and sometimes it seems to be the extension of many other rooms. It is like a telescope and at the same time it is like what you see through a telescope. What it is like, more than anything, is a private room hidden backstage in a very busy theater where the season is in full swing. The ceiling, mysteriously, is covered in stamped tin. At night the patterned ceiling seems to move with the flickering shadows, and in the daytime an occasional shadow drifts slowly across the tin as though it were searching for a permanent refuge. But there is no permanence here—there is only the valiant illusion of a permanence that is hardly more substantial than the shadow that touches it. The house is to be torn down. Nicholas has his apartment by the month, no lease and no assurance that he will still be here a year or even three months from now. Sometimes the furnace breaks down in the dead of winter, and then there is a very cold spell for a few days until the furnace is repaired—the landlord is too sensible to buy a new furnace for a house that may vanish overnight. When anything gets out of order inside the apartment, Nicholas repairs it himself. (He thinks about the low rent he pays and not about the reason for the low rent.) When a wall or a ceiling has to be painted, he paints it. When the books begin to pile up on the floor, he puts up more shelves to join the shelves that now cover most of one long wall from the floor to the ceiling. He builds a cabinet to hide a bad spot in the end wall. The two old rooms, his one room, never had such attention as they are getting in their last days.