Liars in Love, Page 3

  “Daddy?” Edith asked. “Will you sing for us?”

  “Oh well, thanks, honey,” he said, “but no; I really need a piano for that. Thanks anyway.”

  The final performer of the evening was Bart Kampen, persuaded by popular demand to go home and get his violin. There was no surprise in discovering that he played like a professional, like something you might easily hear on the radio; the enjoyment came from watching how his thin face frowned over the chin rest, empty of all emotion except concern that the sound be right. We were proud of him.

  Some time after my father left a good many other adults began to arrive, most of them strangers to me, looking as though they’d already been to several other parties that night. It was very late, or rather very early Christmas morning, when I looked into the kitchen and saw Sloane standing close to a bald man I didn’t know. He held a trembling drink in one hand and slowly massaged her shoulder with the other; she seemed to be shrinking back against the old wooden icebox. Sloane had a way of smiling that allowed little wisps of cigarette smoke to escape from between her almost-closed lips while she looked you up and down, and she was doing that. Then the man put his drink on top of the icebox and took her in his arms, and I couldn’t see her face anymore.

  Another man, in a rumpled brown suit, lay unconscious on the dining-room floor. I walked around him and went into the studio, where a good-looking young woman stood weeping wretchedly and three men kept getting in each other’s way as they tried to comfort her. Then I saw that one of the men was Bart, and I watched while he outlasted the other two and turned the girl away toward the door. He put his arm around her and she nestled her head in his shoulder; that was how they left the house.

  Edith looked jaded in her wrinkled party dress. She was reclining in our old Hastings-on-Hudson easy chair with her head tipped back and her legs flung out over both the chair’s arms, and John sat cross-legged on the floor near one of her dangling feet. They seemed to have been talking about something that didn’t interest either of them much, and the talk petered out altogether when I sat on the floor to join them.

  “Billy,” she said, “do you realize what time it is?”

  “What’s the diff?” I said.

  “You should’ve been in bed hours ago. Come on. Let’s go up.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m going up, anyway,” and she got laboriously out of the chair and walked away into the crowd.

  John turned to me and narrowed his eyes unpleasantly. “Know something?” he said. “When she was in the chair that way I could see everything.”

  “Huh?”

  “I could see everything. I could see the crack, and the hair. She’s beginning to get hair.”

  I had observed these features of my sister many times—in the bathtub, or when she was changing her clothes—and hadn’t found them especially remarkable; even so, I understood at once how remarkable they must have been for him. If only he had smiled in a bashful way we might have laughed together like a couple of regular fellows out of Open Road for Boys, but his face was still set in that disdainful look.

  “I kept looking and looking,” he said, “and I had to keep her talking so she wouldn’t catch on, but I was doing fine until you had to come over and ruin it.”

  Was I supposed to apologize? That didn’t seem right, but nothing else seemed right either. All I did was look at the floor.

  When I finally got to bed there was scarcely time for trying to hear the elusive sound of the city—I had found that a good way to keep from thinking of anything else—when my mother came blundering in. She’d had too much to drink and wanted to lie down, but instead of going to her own room she got into bed with me. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my boy. Oh, my boy.” It was a narrow cot and there was no way to make room for her; then suddenly she retched, bolted to her feet, and ran for the bathroom, where I heard her vomiting. And when I moved over into the part of the bed she had occupied my face recoiled quickly, but not quite in time, from the slick mouthful of puke she had left on her side of the pillow.

  For a month or so that winter we didn’t see much of Sloane because she said she was “working on something big. Something really big.” When it was finished she brought it to the studio, looking tired but prettier than ever, and shyly asked if she could read it aloud.

  “Wonderful,” my mother said. “What’s it about?”

  “That’s the best part. It’s about us. All of us. Listen.”

  Bart had gone for the day and Edith was out in the courtyard by herself—she often played by herself—so there was nobody for an audience but my mother and me. We sat on the sofa and Sloane arranged herself on the tall stool, just as she’d done for telling the Bethlehem story.

  “There is an enchanted courtyard in Greenwich Village,” she read. “It’s only a narrow patch of brick and green among the irregular shapes of very old houses, but what makes it enchanted is that the people who live in it, or near it, have come to form an enchanted circle of friends.

  “None of them have enough money and some are quite poor, but they believe in the future; they believe in each other, and in themselves.

  “There is Howard, once a top reporter on a metropolitan daily newspaper. Everyone knows Howard will soon scale the journalistic heights again, and in the meantime he serves as the wise and humorous sage of the courtyard.

  “There is Bart, a young violinist clearly destined for virtuosity on the concert stage, who just for the present must graciously accept all lunch and dinner invitations in order to survive.

  “And there is Helen, a sculptor whose charming works will someday grace the finest gardens in America, and whose studio is the favorite gathering place for members of the circle.”

  There was more like that, introducing other characters, and toward the end she got around to the children. She described my sister as “a lanky, dreamy tomboy,” which was odd—I had never thought of Edith that way—and she called me “a sad-eyed, seven-year-old philosopher,” which was wholly baffling. When the introduction was over she paused a few seconds for dramatic effect and then went into the opening episode of the series, or what I suppose would be called the “pilot.”

  I couldn’t follow the story very well—it seemed to be mostly an excuse for bringing each character up to the microphone for a few lines apiece—and before long I was listening only to see if there would be any lines for the character based on me. And there were, in a way. She announced my name—“Billy”—but then instead of speaking she put her mouth through a terrible series of contortions, accompanied by funny little bursts of sound, and by the time the words came out I didn’t care what they were. It was true that I stuttered badly—I wouldn’t get over it for five or six more years—but I hadn’t expected anyone to put it on the radio.

  “Oh, Sloane, that’s marvelous,” my mother said when the reading was over. “That’s really exciting.”

  And Sloane was carefully stacking her typed pages in the way she’d probably been taught to do in secretarial school, blushing and smiling with pride. “Well,” she said, “it probably needs work, but I do think it’s got a lot of potential.”

  “It’s perfect,” my mother said. “Just the way it is.”

  Sloane mailed the script to a radio producer and he mailed it back with a letter typed by some radio secretary, explaining that her material had too limited an appeal to be commercial. The radio public was not yet ready, he said, for a story of Greenwich Village life.

  Then it was March. The new President promised that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and soon after that his head came packed in wood and excelsior from Mr. Nicholson’s foundry.

  It was a fairly good likeness. She had caught the famous lift of the chin—it might not have looked like him at all if she hadn’t—and everyone told her it was fine. What nobody said was that her original plan had been right, and Mr. Nicholson shouldn’t have interfered: it was too small. It didn’t look heroic. If you could have h
ollowed it out and put a slot in the top, it might have made a serviceable bank for loose change.

  The foundry had burnished the lead until it shone almost silver in the highlights, and they’d mounted it on a sturdy little base of heavy black plastic. They had sent back three copies: one for the White House presentation, one to keep for exhibition purposes, and an extra one. But the extra one soon toppled to the floor and was badly damaged—the nose mashed almost into the chin—and my mother might have burst into tears if Howard Whitman hadn’t made everyone laugh by saying it was now a good portrait of Vice President Garner.

  Charlie Hines, Howard’s old friend from the Post who was now a minor member of the White House staff, made an appointment for my mother with the President late on a weekday morning. She arranged for Sloane to spend the night with Edith and me; then she took an evening train down to Washington, carrying the sculpture in a cardboard box, and stayed at one of the less expensive Washington hotels. In the morning she met Charlie Hines in some crowded White House anteroom, where I guess they disposed of the cardboard box, and he took her to the waiting room outside the Oval Office. He sat with her as she held the naked head in her lap, and when their turn came he escorted her in to the President’s desk for the presentation. It didn’t take long. There were no reporters and no photographers.

  Afterwards Charlie Hines took her out to lunch, probably because he’d promised Howard Whitman to do so. I imagine it wasn’t a first-class restaurant, more likely some bustling, no-nonsense place favored by the working press, and I imagine they had trouble making conversation until they settled on Howard, and on what a shame it was that he was still out of work.

  “No, but do you know Howard’s friend Bart Kampen?” Charlie asked. “The young Dutchman? The violinist?”

  “Yes, certainly,” she said. “I know Bart.”

  “Well, Jesus, there’s one story with a happy ending, right? Have you heard about that? Last time I saw Bart he said, ‘Charlie, the Depression’s over for me,’ and he told me he’d found some rich, dumb, crazy woman who’s paying him to tutor her kids.”

  I can picture how she looked riding the long, slow train back to New York that afternoon. She must have sat staring straight ahead or out the dirty window, seeing nothing, her eyes round and her face held in a soft shape of hurt. Her adventure with Franklin D. Roosevelt had come to nothing. There would be no photographs or interviews or feature articles, no thrilling moments of newsreel coverage; strangers would never know of how she’d come from a small Ohio town, or of how she’d nurtured her talent through the brave, difficult, one-woman journey that had brought her to the attention of the world. It wasn’t fair.

  All she had to look forward to now was her romance with Eric Nicholson, and I think she may have known even then that it was faltering—his final desertion came the next fall.

  She was forty-one, an age when even romantics must admit that youth is gone, and she had nothing to show for the years but a studio crowded with green plaster statues that nobody would buy. She believed in the aristocracy, but there was no reason to suppose the aristocracy would ever believe in her.

  And every time she thought of what Charlie Hines had said about Bart Kampen—oh, how hateful; oh, how hateful—the humiliation came back in wave on wave, in merciless rhythm to the clatter of the train.

  She made a brave show of her homecoming, though nobody was there to greet her but Sloane and Edith and me. Sloane had fed us, and she said, “There’s a plate for you in the oven, Helen,” but my mother said she’d rather just have a drink instead. She was then at the onset of a long battle with alcohol that she would ultimately lose; it must have seemed bracing that night to decide on a drink instead of dinner. Then she told us “all about” her trip to Washington, managing to make it sound like a success. She talked of how thrilling it was to be actually inside the White House; she repeated whatever small, courteous thing it was that President Roosevelt had said to her on receiving the head. And she had brought back souvenirs: a handful of note-size White House stationery for Edith, and a well-used briar pipe for me. She explained that she’d seen a very distinguished-looking man smoking the pipe in the waiting room outside the Oval Office; when his name was called he had knocked it out quickly into an ashtray and left it there as he hurried inside. She had waited until she was sure no one was looking; then she’d taken the pipe from the ashtray and put it in her purse. “Because I knew he must have been somebody important,” she said. “He could easily have been a member of the Cabinet, or something like that. Anyway, I thought you’d have a lot of fun with it.” But I didn’t. It was too heavy to hold in my teeth and it tasted terrible when I sucked on it; besides, I kept wondering what the man must have thought when he came out of the President’s office and found it gone.

  Sloane went home after awhile, and my mother sat drinking alone at the dining-room table. I think she hoped Howard Whitman or some of her other friends might drop in, but nobody did. It was almost our bedtime when she looked up and said, “Edith? Run out in the garden and see if you can find Bart.”

  He had recently bought a pair of bright tan shoes with crepe soles. I saw those shoes trip rapidly down the dark brick steps beyond the windows—he seemed scarcely to touch each step in his buoyancy—and then I saw him come smiling into the studio, with Edith closing the door behind him. “Helen!” he said. “You’re back!”

  She acknowledged that she was back. Then she got up from the table and slowly advanced on him, and Edith and I began to realize we were in for something bad.

  “Bart,” she said, “I had lunch with Charlie Hines in Washington today.”

  “Oh?”

  “And we had a very interesting talk. He seems to know you very well.”

  “Oh, not really; we’ve met a few times at Howard’s, but we’re not really—”

  “And he said you’d told him the Depression was over for you because you’d found some rich, dumb, crazy woman who was paying you to tutor her kids. Don’t interrupt me.”

  But Bart clearly had no intention of interrupting her. He was backing away from her in his soundless shoes, retreating past one stiff green garden child after another. His face looked startled and pink.

  “I’m not a rich woman, Bart,” she said, bearing down on him. “And I’m not dumb. And I’m not crazy. And I can recognize ingratitude and disloyalty and sheer, rotten viciousness and lies when they’re thrown in my face.”

  My sister and I were halfway up the stairs, jostling each other in our need to hide before the worst part came. The worst part of these things always came at the end, after she’d lost all control and gone on shouting anyway.

  “I want you to get out of my house, Bart,” she said. “And I don’t ever want to see you again. And I want to tell you something. All my life I’ve hated people who say ‘Some of my best friends are Jews.’ Because none of my friends are Jews, or ever will be. Do you understand me? None of my friends are Jews, or ever will be.”

  The studio was quiet after that. Without speaking, avoiding each other’s eyes, Edith and I got into our pajamas and into bed. But it wasn’t more than a few minutes before the house began to ring with our mother’s raging voice all over again, as if Bart had somehow been brought back and made to take his punishment twice.

  “… And I said ‘None of my friends are Jews, or ever will be.…’”

  She was on the telephone, giving Sloane Cabot the highlights of the scene, and it was clear that Sloane would take her side and comfort her. Sloane might know how the Virgin Mary felt on the way to Bethlehem, but she also knew how to play my stutter for laughs. In a case like this she would quickly see where her allegiance lay, and it wouldn’t cost her much to drop Bart Kampen from her enchanted circle.

  When the telephone call came to an end at last there was silence downstairs until we heard her working with the ice pick in the icebox: she was making herself another drink.

  There would be no more school in our room. We would probably never see Bart again—o
r if we ever did, he would probably not want to see us. But our mother was ours; we were hers; and we lived with that knowledge as we lay listening for the faint, faint sound of millions.

  A Natural Girl

  IN THE SPRING of her sophomore year when she was twenty, Susan Andrews told her father very calmly that she didn’t love him anymore. She regretted it, or at least the tone of it, almost at once, but it was too late: he sat looking stunned for a few seconds and then began to cry, all hunched over to hide his face from her, trying with one unsteady hand to get a handkerchief out of his dark suit. He was one of the five or six most respected hematologists in the United States, and nothing like this had happened to him for a great many years.

  They were alone in Susan’s dormitory room at a small, celebrated liberal arts college called Turnbull, in Wisconsin. She had worn a demure yellow dress that day because it seemed appropriate for his visit, but now she felt constricted by the primness of it and the way it obliged her to keep her narrow, pretty knees pressed together. She would much rather have been wearing faded jeans and a man’s shirt with the top two buttons unfastened, as she did on most other days. Her brown eyes were big and sorrowful and her long hair was almost black. She had recently been told many times, in ardor and with justice, that she was a lovely girl.

  She knew that if she’d made her declaration in anger or in tears there might now be some way to take it back, but she wasn’t really sorry to have that option closed. She had come to learn the value and the price of honesty in all things: if you dealt cleanly with the world there was never any taking of anything back. Still, this was the first time she had ever seen her father cry, and it brought a heaviness of blood to her own throat.

  “All right,” Dr. Andrews said in a broken voice, still hanging his head. “All right, you don’t love me. But tell me this much, dear. Tell me why.”