Twice Told Tales (18 page)

Myrna sits, stoned with unwanted information. It has taken all her energy to get to the hospital and she only vaguely knows who these writers are. She expected rage, threats, anything but a literary memoir of regret. She is impatient.

Katherine slows down. “What I remember most is Fitzgerald’s saying he was a poor caretaker of his talent. Me too. Poor caretaker of everything.”

Myrna cannot take any more. “Listen,” she says. “I never really had time to read after I finished school. Just plays. Maybe that’s why I thought it was so amazing that it was a writer who was leaving me her child—but I don’t feel educated or qualified to talk or even listen about Fitzgerald and those. But I did love taking care of Tulip. It got out of hand. All of a sudden I felt as if she was my only chance. I didn’t have a part for a year-and-a-half. Nothing! Not even an Equity Library Showcase. Zero! Then Tulip came along. I never understood why. But there she was. I had to tell her a lie when I ran away, that her mother was sick and her father couldn’t take care of her and that I’d been chosen to take care of her …”

“You were right.”

“No, I was crazy. But I want to thank you, Mrs. Eudemie.”

“We have the same child; I think you can call me Katherine.”

Myrna stumbled on the words, “Katherine—Kath—Katherine,” she said. “It’s stupid to thank somebody when you take something from them—but thanks.”

Katherine then, turning for some reason to lie on her side, speaks to Myrna sitting behind her, passionately, with all the desperate concern for being understood that a patient brings to the discourse of analysis, at certain moments. “I worked and worked on my new career. I knew how sick I was—so I’ve had a very short career as a lay analyst—about a year. And I’ve really had one patient: myself. One patient and one major symptom—if you think symptoms are the name of the game and I don’t. In spite of that I’ve been working on the parapraxes—the slips, forgetting Tulip over and over again—but especially the beginning when it was still a single slip—before you and the others got involved … and all I could come up with was the old explanations, chewed-over modernist bullshit—the creative spirit turns destructive when it’s blocked … that I was sacrificing my only successful creation in revenge for screwing up as a writer. Oh, none of it matters except that you were right, Myrna.”

Katherine Eudemie turns back and scares the hell out of Myrna by grabbing her and hugging the young woman to her. She cries out, “You were right, you were chosen to take care of her … take her back … take her back … go downstairs, take her back and finish reading
Treasure Island.
I trust you …” But while she is telling her to go she is holding on tightly and all Myrna can think of is she has finally gotten her marbles back and brought the kid to her mother who is losing hers.

To make it worse Katherine Eudemie’s nose starts to bleed. This makes for a shocking sight when Jackson Eudemie walks in. He has come to the hospital to visit his wife and found his missing daughter reading a book by Robert Louis Stevenson in the lobby and excitedly brought her up to the room over the protests of Security. There is blood all over the sheets and the women are holding each other as if in a death-struggle. Jackson Eudemie plunges to the bed even though he is still holding Tulip.

Myrna was crying out to all of them—and to the nurses who finally heard the uproar and came flying in—“Don’t you want to know why I brought the kid back? All you care about is your own goddamn selves not about her.” They froze in some hideous red-speckled, white-sheeted version of Laocöon’s struggle. “I sent her to the store to get some cartons of milk and cereal, stuff like that, and she got all giant sizes and she was wobbling up the stairs, a walk-up in Dover, New Jersey, and when she saw me she said, ‘Myrna, help, help, Myrna.’ And I grabbed the stuff from her and I almost stopped breathing because I got it, I got so clearly that it was over. She never asked for anything before and now I knew we were in trouble and I knew it was over …”

But by this time the nurses who represented the Official World of Help had taken over and the Opera Seria was finished.

Finally it doesn’t matter how you got where you are. It matters where you are and where you’re going. Katherine went to sleep at last two days later. Tulip, having been away from home so long under the cover story of being with her grandparents in Vancouver, actually went to Canada immediately. Finding themselves alone, Myrna and Jackson Eudemie inevitably found each other.

Eleven months later they were married and Tulip came home.

Myrna and Jackson already had little lovers’ tricks of word play. One of them was this: he would say, “Everything begins in lust,” and she would reply, as they dozed off, “Everything ends in sleep.” Or she’d say, “Everything begins in curiosity,” and he’d say, “Everything ends in boredom.” It was part of his attempt at a literary corruption of Myrna.

Before they decided to get married, Jackson accused her of going through with it just to get Tulip after all. What he said was: “Everything begins in planning.” And her denial was: “Everything ends in luck.”

“I heard you were in love with Lew Krale.”

“That was more of my own craziness. It would have been nice.

“It would have been awful. Do you know Lew?”

“He used to ask my advice. I liked that. But it seems to me I was really in love with Katherine.”

“Oh.”

“She came to see me and we walked in the park. Everything about her—even her troubles—dumping a baby day after day—it all seemed glamorous. I was taking part in a fairy tale. I read her book. I loved that she was a writer.”

“Romanticism. You ended up with the editor.”

She laughed. “And the child.”

It had never occurred to Jackson Eudemie that he would marry again after Katherine died. But that was about as unoriginal as most of his ideas. And if Myrna did marry him for his child it didn’t quite work since boarding school, college, and Tulip’s own marriage came it seemed in a matter of minutes. Myrna had been prescient about her childless destiny. She could not conceive. Tulip
had
been her last chance. What Myrna got was Jackson Eudemie and a small press the two of them operate now, twenty-two years later, from their house in Greenwich, Connecticut.

And what of Tulip? What was she thinking and feeling during all that tumult of attention, of education of abduction, of being jolted, pulled, and pushed to be this or that emblem for the adults in the RR universe. It’s interesting to speculate and observe because only a few weeks ago, more than two decades after these events, a reporter for
Time
magazine heard the story at the RR. The intellectual Lindbergh case with a happy ending was how he sold the story to his editors and he cornered the grown-up Tulip, now twenty-four years old and a publicist for the Mark Taper Forum and married to a tax lawyer, Reuben Rosenfeld, who also collected first folio Shakespeare.

“Oh, yes,” Tulip said. “I remember it all. My mother was agitated and wild, a poet after all. I don’t think I knew then what I’m saying now but I knew, somehow! My father, he was something else again: elegant, eloquent, great style, and full of love. He could have been a great man in publishing but he wouldn’t make the necessary compromises.” (Jackson Eudemie would have been astonished at such notions. He knew he was only a Hack playing Man of Letters. A harmless game, neither noble nor ignoble. Children are strange: you get either hero-worship or rage both usually unfounded in real cause.)

“But do you recall how you actually felt? The experience of it? Being raised in the hat check room of a restaurant?”

Tulip Rosenfeld thought a moment. “I was only four,” she said. “I would have liked to have friends. Once a little girl was allowed to stay with me while her parents had tea on a snowbound day, a real blizzard. We sneaked out and threw snowballs at the box office of Carnegie Hall. Her name was Leslie and she had an eye which drifted.”

“Wouldn’t that be a screen memory? Not something a four-year-old would notice and remember?”

“Maybe.”

“And how could you tell the twin headwaiters from each other when no one else could?”

“It’s a knack. Like recognizing shades of color. You just know.”

“Weren’t you ever frightened?”

“Sometimes I’d be a little triste and long for my mother.”

“You have some French words. Didn’t you study French at the RR with Ionesco?”

“Short? Bald? Drank a lot?”

“Yes.”

“That was the one. Listen, this may not be the best time to interview me about this.”

“Why not?”

“I’m pregnant. You get big mood swings when you’re going to have a baby.”

“Ah …”

So—here is Tulip, pregnant! Myrna and Jackson call her immediately. Yes, it is true, she says, Reuben and she had been planning to call them with the news. Tulip is as cool and steady as her mother was warm and volatile.

“Everything begins in rumors and ends in babies,” Myrna jokes.

“Everything begins in
Time
magazine and ends in reality,” Jackson Eudemie replies.

At the cemetery Katherine was waiting. What else was there for her to do?

“Katherine,” Jackson said, standing at the foot of her grave. “This is hard to believe, but Tulip is having a baby.”

“God, Jackson, you’re so self-conscious. You could have told me at home.”

“It seemed more appropriate here.”

“You were always so damned appropriate.”

“Listen, I didn’t come out to this God-forsaken part of Long Island to have a post-marital argument. I just wanted to tell you you’re going to be a grandmother.”

“That’s neat.”

“Grandmother’s don’t use words like ‘neat.’”

“This one does. If I still can be one—or anything. It’s not clear you know.”

“I know. I guess.”

“How come you never came here before?”

He was silent.

“Is Tulip happy? It’s so hard for me to imagine her grown up. And a mother.”

“It’s hard for me too,” Jackson said. “Living doesn’t solve anything, you know.”

“Neither does dying,” Katherine said. “I wish I could go for some therapy and I wish I could finish my novel.”

“Me too,” Jackson said. “I’m writing fiction, now. After you died I got tired of compiling anthologies. Myrna thought I should be a real writer. I started a novel. I haven’t finished it yet. That was twenty-two years ago.”

“Novels are hard,” Katherine said.

“I know. I’m back to my old bread and butter. Right now I have an assignment to do a children’s version of Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
The research is fascinating.”

“My God!”

“I have to make a living.”

“Of course. Tell Tulip I’m proud my baby’s having a baby.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“I guess not,” Katherine said.

It was chilly and the trek back from the cemetery made Jackson hungry. He went back via Manhattan and found himself at the Russian Rendezvous. It was six o’clock, Thursday evening, fall in New York. All of those things. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the RR, Jackson Eudemie shivered and loved them all passionately at that moment: twilight, midweek, autumn, midtown New York; loved them as you can only love such things right after a visit to the cemetery. He faced East and it was as if the long line of “civilians”—that’s what Lew Krale used to call ordinary people with no claim to an art form, whose names would never appear in either
The Hudson Review
or
Variety
—it was as if they were all heading up the slight slope of Fifty-seventh Street, all the way from the East River, toward a dinner at The Russian Rendezvous. He saw them all as “going-to-bes” in that twilight hallucination. After all everyone is en route to something. He was en route to becoming a grandfather and had just come from a conversation in a cemetery. Everyone is hungry for something if only dinner.

Jackson sat in a front booth and ordered a giant meal: zakuska—spicy Russian hors d’oeuvres, borscht, hot in honor of the first cool fall evening, karsky shashlik, and tea. By the time he finished, the pre-concert crowd was thick in the front waiting for tables, his included. But when he went to pay the check Jackson found that his wallet had not made it back with him from the graveyards of Long Island.

How embarrassing! He had not seen Lew Krale for a couple of years. Lew was gray and gaunt but with a tranquil air, no longer so frantic. He sipped a Seven-up and grinned.

“I see you haven’t changed, Jackson,” he said. “You still can’t pay.”

“I see you have changed,” Jackson said. He waved at the crowd. “You’re drinking Seven-up and I’m the
only
one who can’t pay. I’ll send you a check tomorrow.”

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’m up to my ass in checks. Somebody offered to buy me out the other day for three million dollars. I gave him a drink instead.”

Jackson told Lew about Tulip getting pregnant and Lew bought them both vodkas. They toasted the impending grandchild.

“Is this okay?” Jackson asked. “You drinking again?”

“I can take it or leave it. Since Tulip. That kid changed everything.”

Jackson asked him how it felt to be such a grand success. Lew’s face went dark.

“Don’t make fun of an old friend.”

Jackson swore he’d meant it kindly.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Lew said. “It feels good—but not right. You can’t change at my age. How about you and Myrna?”

“We’re always just getting by. I almost had a best-seller: a book on Great Teas of the World. But it fizzled out. I’m the only publisher in the world who would try to make a coffee table book out of tea. I’m too old to change.”

“Listen,” Lew Krale said. “Just not dying young is a kind of success.”

“It’s a kind of failure, too.”

His eyes opened wide: the old Lew. “You think so?” he said, a hint of hope in the question.

On the strength of that question the two of them drank the evening to its end. Jackson called Myrna twice with a revised schedule. The headwaiter changed tables around them three times. At last they began to be a problem. Too noisy, old jokes and memories too raucous, and they ended up climbing over the ledge of the hat check room.