This Is Not for You (33 page)

By the time I met her, she was nearing sixty, and, though she was extraordinarily hard-working, some of the natural energy, which had won her so much admiration and probably at one time strong criticism, too, was gone. The attractiveness was not. She had the kind of dark hair that moves to white without stages of gray. And, though her face was strong-boned, it was gently fleshed, both her mouth and eyes sensitive to and expressive of a narrow, positive range of moods. I never saw her depressed, but she smiled and laughed easily. Though she was absent-minded about combing her hair, often noticed a button or a drooping hemline after she got to the office, she dressed well and was, with good reason, proud of her figure, faddish about diet. Her staff, all of them Greek, liked to indulge her in the few quirks she had, and she let them, with an amused gratitude that did not get in the way of her being very demanding about thorough and accurate work. No one stayed in her office long who did not like to work.

I arrived prepared to like her, and I did, but at our first meeting I felt I had not made a very good impression. When I got back to my room at the YWCA, I nervously went over the questions and answers of that hour, wondering what kinds of mistakes I had made. Oh, she had been kind enough, but something in her manner was reserved, even perhaps disapproving. Had I been too critical of what I had seen in Sicily? I didn’t think so. Had I asked too many questions or the wrong ones or too few? Had I been too casual? No, I had probably been too formal. When I could locate no specific mistakes, I was impatient with my own nervousness. I decided that my only mistake was being disappointed that she hadn’t recognized something remarkable in me. And, when I came upon that truth, I realized that I had been in love with the myth of Grace Hardwick for several months, was, after one hour with her, in love with the person of Grace Hardwick as well. She knew it. She was used to it. She would not let it get in her way. I decided that it wouldn’t get in my way, either.

It was that first evening that I took a bus tour up the Acropolis to see the Parthenon. For a while I stayed with the crowd of tourists and listened to the guide. On the steps of the Parthenon, he delivered a tribute to Athena who was not, he insisted, a primitive image of the Virgin Mother, but the manifestation of both masculine and feminine virtues. This building in its perfect proportions, combining strength and subtlety, was more an embodiment of Athena than any of the representations of her we would see either here or in the British Museum. All the attributes at the center of Greece’s unique greatness were here in an aesthetic both rational and humane…. I walked away and stood at the wall, looking down at modern Athens, a mean, gimcrack sprawl of crumbling plaster and dirt and noise in the shadow of this great and ancient hill, this perfect intelligence. I was moved as I have never been in church, both awed and required by the truth behind me and the bitterness at my feet.

I didn’t carry this revelation with shining eyes into the office the next morning. I’d have to do my own admiring of my winning sensitivity and medal intelligence. This woman honored nothing but successful hard work, and I should not expect stars for that, either. I could hear my father say with some wryness, “The truth is that virtue is not only its own reward, it is often its only reward.” At the end of the week, I was so much absorbed in learning the idiosyncrasy of the office routine and reading reports in the spare minutes I had that I didn’t notice at first the absence of that arm’s length at which I had been kept. I must have reacted to it just the same because my comments about my discoveries were less and less guarded.

“Did you really send this report on the children’s villages to the Queen?”

“She asked me for it,” Grace Hardwick said.

“Well, if it’s possible to say what you think, it’s possible to do something about it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and a good thing for you to learn. You’re so nearly a candidate for the Junior League, I wonder how you came to be here at all.”

“I’m half breed,” I said. “Mongrels can’t be volunteers. They have to be professionals.”

“Really? Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve been home.”

“You wouldn’t like Washington,” I said.

“Do you mean I wouldn’t get along there?”

“No,” I said quickly “No, I—”

“Don’t be embarrassed. Everyone’s a little shocked by the system here at first. You have to understand how elaborate authority is in Greece before you can ignore it, and you have to be a foreigner. People don’t usually stay long enough to find that out. I only appear to be reckless. I never am.”

That night we had dinner together at a restaurant where Grace Hardwick often ate. As soon as she had done the ordering for us both, she sat back and looked at me with direct but amused regard.

“This is the evening I’ve set aside for getting to know you,” she said. “Shall I ask questions, or will you just talk?”

“I don’t really know what sort of thing I should say.”

“Do you have an apartment in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Do you live in it alone?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it. Tell me what’s in it.”

I don’t remember another question or command all through dinner. When we had finished and she had paid the bill, she said, “Now, would you like to see mine?”

“Very much,” I said.

It was an apartment very like one I would live in. There were a few pieces of family furniture. There were paintings. There were more objects, collected over the traveling years. When I had looked around and asked questions about some things, we went out onto a balcony that looked across the city to the lighted Acropolis. A bottle of brandy and two glasses had already been set out on a small table.

“How do you feel about Athens?” she asked, once she had poured our drinks.

“I haven’t seen much of it,” I said.

“You don’t like it.”

“No.”

“No, neither do I,” she said. “As for the Acropolis, I’m nearly too old for that by now, but I expect you aren’t. You would admire Athena.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I have too much of Arachne in me to admire any of them, or did have at one time. The errors of the gods don’t seem that important to me now.”

“Is it hard to live for a long time in a place you don’t like?”

“Not at all. You see, I love it. Greece. I’m thinking of asking you to come along on a trip I have to make next week. How’s your driving?”

“Good,” I said.

“Mine’s not. It never has been, but I don’t like taking any of my Greek staff with me. They’re too suspicious, too critical.”

For a time then we sat without talking, watching the large, star-lit sky above the distant temple. When I finished my brandy, I got up and said good night.

“Don’t show me to the door,” I said. “I can find my own way.”

The policy of working through local welfare agencies which had seemed an uncertain solution in Italy worked very well in Greece under Grace Hardwick’s direction, but she spent a great deal of her time driving around the country to see that the money was being used as it should be. She not only made it her business to know all the local authorities but also kept an eye out for people who might be good in the welfare offices. Her knowledge of regional politics was her knowledge of particular people. On that first trip, I began to keep a notebook of names and comments, hers and my own. We called on villages where money was being used to reestablish pottery factories, wineries, olive groves. I started a second notebook on village industries. We saw particular families, too, sometimes because they were old friends, more often because we had heard about a child who needed an eye operation or a scholarship, things that could not be arranged without permission of the head office. They were long days. We were often on the road by six in the morning, and we never ate dinner before ten o’clock in the evening, usually with at least two other people, but Grace often slept for an hour or so in the car, and she insisted that I take an hour’s rest in the afternoon, often simply under a tree by the side of the road after a picnic lunch. At those times, she wrote in notebooks of her own. At first, I found it hard to doze while she was busy at work, but by the fourth or fifth day I didn’t have to be ordered to relax. I could fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. Once, when I woke, she was watching me, amused.

“You’re still no more than a child,” she said. “I wish I could do that.”

“I wish I could help it,” I said. “It’s the air. It has the taste of my childhood.”

“You like it here, don’t you?”

“I love it.”

“I should take time to show you temples, but I haven’t got it. You’ll find the time one day yourself.”

The trip, as first planned, was to take just over a week, but, because the Athens office seemed to be running smoothly and because there was always something else to check on, someone else to confer with, we spent more than two weeks in the Peloponnesus. Grace didn’t talk much in general about the work though she answered questions readily enough. She could, anyway, reveal more with a quick comment than most people can in an hour’s lecture. She accomplished more over ouzo with two officials than I had seen accomplished all the time I was in Washington.

“Your Greek’s improving,” she said, as we were on our way back to Athens. “You have a good ear. And you can drive a car.”

At that compliment, I passed a burro and rider with more style than courtesy, and she had the good humor to laugh.

“I’m told you’re being groomed for executive work in New York and Washington. I’m told you’re very bright about policy and government regulations. Also tactful and presentable. Is that what you want?”

“I thought so,” I said, “before I came here.”

“How would you like to stay?”

“Is there any chance of it?” I asked, my tone of voice answering her question.

“I’ve been offered the salary for an American assistant for several years, I suppose because I’m getting old. I haven’t liked the idea. But I am getting old, whether I like it or not. I haven’t more than five years left, maybe fewer. I’d suggest that you be appointed provisionally for a year. After that, we could see how you liked it, and how I liked your work.”

“There’s nothing I’d like more than working here with you.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

I had only ten days in Athens by the time we got back, but in that ten days arrangements had been made, with some flattering reluctance in New York, for me to stay on.

“I told them there are lots of people with good manners and political connections. You happen to speak Greek,” Grace said, pleased with herself. “Now, what are you going to do about your apartment?”

“Sublet it for the time being.”

“Good. Finding a place in Athens isn’t hard as long as you have money, but there really isn’t any reason to spend it. You could move in with me.”

“That’s kind of you,” I said, “but I’d better not.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could, “and you might find that a nuisance.”

“I’m too old to find it a nuisance,” Grace answered, “and you’re old enough to put up with it.”

So I wrote to Dan, asking him to pack me a trunk, store my paintings, and find a tenant for my apartment. Then I packed the suitcase I had and moved into the spare bedroom at Grace Hardwick’s apartment. We were neither one of us in it very often except to sleep. A girl came in early every morning to fix our breakfast, clean up after we had left and do our laundry. She was gone by the time we came back for an hour’s rest after lunch. We were often not home again until midnight. Grace took only a Sunday holiday which she usually spent reading and writing letters. It did not seem to occur to her to fix a meal for herself even then when there was time. After I had been there a month, I was tired of restaurant food and of always eating in public.

“I’m hungry for my own cooking,” I announced. “Would you mind if I got you a meal this Sunday?”

“Can you cook?” she asked doubtfully.

“Have the courtesy to risk it just once,” I said, “and then you can decide.”

“Well, see that it’s good. I’m cranky about a bad meal.”

“You’re not. I’ve seen you perfectly good-humored after meals I could just barely choke down.”

“But on Sunday I don’t work,” she said.

I had not eaten three meals a day with her without noticing what she enjoyed. Our first Sunday meal was so much a success that there was never a question of eating out on Sunday again. In fact, Grace occasionally complained that she got a decent meal only once a week, but there wasn’t time for me to shop or cook during the week. Often we were invited out to dinner, which I enjoyed more than Grace did. She found some of the formality of political social life tedious.

“You’ll really be better at this one day than I am,” she said late one evening as we were coming back from a particularly solemn evening. “You can be as stuffy as the worst of them.”

“That’s why I was a candidate for Washington,” I said.

“Is that a threat?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m glad. You know, I intend to have two tantrums and a stroke if you decide to go back at the end of the year. I might find another assistant, but I’d never find such a cook again.”

“You know I want to stay,” I said.

“So you see, living with someone you love isn’t impossible, is it? That’s not a bad lesson to learn, however peculiarly. But will you want to stay after I’m gone? That’s what you really have to decide.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know, Kate, my darling, to hell or Italy or some place. I won’t stay here. I don’t feel guilty about not dealing with your sexual appetites. I’d guess they’ve been nothing but a problem to you anyway, but I’m not interested in your appetite for martyrdom, either. One dying mother is enough.”

“Do you think I could handle it alone?” I asked.

“Sure of it. Oh, I also think you’re awfully young and silly, but you’ll outgrow that. Do you want to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Good. That’s reassuring. But we must set aside an evening or two for talking about what you don’t know and why you don’t know.”

“Make it three evenings,” I said.