“Whore,” she cried, “don’t steal the privileges of your betters. Use the stairs.”
Grace opened the apartment door to see what the shouting was about, and Eleonora, with a yowl, rushed past her. She locked herself in her room and sat there all afternoon without moving. She wept copiously. Grace, on the verge of exhaustion, could do nothing with her. When George came home from work that evening he tried to coax her out, but she shouted at him to leave her alone.
George was thoroughly fed up. “I’ve had enough,” he said. He thought out how he would handle the signora, then told Grace he was going across the hall.
“Don’t do it,” she shouted, but he was already on his way.
George knocked on the signora’s door. She was a woman of past sixty-five, a widow, always dressed in black. Her face was long and gray, but her eyes were bright black. Her husband had left her these two apartments across the hall from each other that he had owned outright. She lived in the smaller and rented the other, furnished, at a good rent. George knew that this was her only source of income. She had once been a schoolteacher.
“Scusi, Signora,” said George, “I have come with a request.”
“Prego.” She asked him to sit.
George took a chair near the terrace window. “I would really appreciate it, Signora, if you will let our girl go into the elevator with the laundry when my wife sends her up to the tubs. She is not a fortunate person and we would like to make her life a little easier for her.”
“I am sorry,” answered the signora with dignity, “but I can’t permit her to enter the elevator.”
“She’s a good girl and you have upset her very much.”
“Good,” said the signora, “I am glad. She must remember her place, even if you don’t. This is Italy, not America. You must understand that we have to live with these people long after you, who come to stay for a year or two, return to your own country.”
“Signora, she does no harm in the elevator. We are not asking you to ride with her. After all, the elevators are a convenience for all who live in this house and therefore ought to be open for those who work for us here.”
“No,” said the signora.
“Why not think it over and let me know your answer tomorrow? I assure you I wouldn’t ask this if I didn’t think it was important.”
“I have thought it over,” she said stiffly, “and I have given you the same answer I will give tomorrow.”
George got up. “In that case,” he said, “if you won’t listen to reason, I consider my lease with you ended. You have had your last month’s rent. We will move on the first of February.”
The signora looked as if she had just swallowed a fork.
“The lease is a sacred contract,” she said, trembling. “It is against the law to break it.”
“I consider that you have already broken it,” George said quietly, “by creating conditions that make it very hard for my family to function in this apartment. I am simply acknowledging a situation that already exists.”
“If you move out, I will take a lawyer and make you pay for the whole year.”
“A lawyer will cost you half the rent he might collect,” George answered. “And if my lawyer is better than yours, you will get nothing and owe your lawyer besides.”
“Oh, you Americans,” said the signora bitterly. “How well I understand you. Your money is your dirty foot with which you kick the world. Who wants you here,” she cried, “with your soaps and toothpastes and your dirty gangster movies!”
“I would like to remind you that my origin is Italian,” George said.
“You have long ago forgotten your origin,” she shouted.
George left the apartment and went back to his own.
“I’ll bet you did it,” Grace greeted him. Her face was ashen.
“I did,” said George.
“I’ll bet you fixed us good. Oh, you ought to be proud. How will we ever find another apartment in the dead of winter with two kids?”
She left George and locked herself in the children’s bedroom. They were both awake and got out of bed to be with her.
George sat in the living room in the dark. I did it, he was thinking.
After a while the doorbell rang. He got up and put on the light. It was the signora and she looked unwell. She entered the living room at George’s invitation and sat there with great dignity.
“I am sorry I raised my voice to a guest in my house,” she said. Her mouth was loose and her eyes glistened.
“I am sorry I offended you,” George said.
She did not speak for a while, then said, “Let the girl use the elevator.” The signora broke into tears.
When she had dried her eyes, she said, “You have no idea how bad things have become since the war. The girls are disrespectful. Their demands are endless, it is impossible to keep up with them. They talk back, they take every advantage. They crown themselves with privileges. It is a struggle to keep them in their place. After all, what have we left when we lose our self-respect?” The signora wept heartbrokenly.
After she had gone, George stood at the window. Across the street a beggar played a flute.
I didn’t do it well, George thought. He felt depressed.
On her afternoon off Eleonora rode up and down on the elevator.
1957
FOGEL, a writer, had had another letter from Gary Simson, the would-be writer, a request as usual. He wrote fiction but hadn’t jelled. Fogel, out of respect, saved letters from writers but was tempted not to include Simson although he had begun to publish. I am not his mentor, though he calls himself my student. If so what have I taught him? In the end he placed the letter in his files. I have his others, he thought.
Eli Fogel was a better than ordinary writer but not especially “successful.” He disliked the word. His productivity was limited by his pace which, for reasons of having to breathe hard to enjoy life, was slow. Two and a half books in fifteen years, the half a paperback of undistinguished verse. My limp is symbolic, he thought. His leg had been injured in a bicycle accident as a youth, though with the built-up shoe the limp was less noticeable than when he hobbled around barefoot. He limped for his lacks. Fogel, for instance, regretted never having married, blaming this on his devotion to work. It’s not that it has to be one or the other, but for me it’s one or none. He was, mildly, a monomaniac. That simplified life but reduced it—what else? Still, he did not pity himself. It amused Fogel rather than not that the protagonists of his two published novels were married men with families, their wounds deriving from sources other than hurt members and primal loneliness. Imagination saves me, he thought.
Both his novels had received praise, though not much else; and Fogel had for the past six years labored on a third, about half
completed. Since he declined to write reviews, lecture, or teach regularly, he ran into money problems. Fortunately he had from his father a small inheritance that came to five thousand annually, a shrinking sum in an inflated world; so Fogel reluctantly accepted summer-school invitations, or taught, somewhat on the prickly side, at writers’ conferences, one or two a summer. With what he had he made do.
It was at one of these conferences in Buffalo, in June, and at another in mid-August of the same summer, on the campus of a small college in the White Mountains, that the writer had met, and later renewed a friendship with, Gary Simson, then less than half Fogel’s age; a friendship of sorts, mild, fallible, but for a while satisfying; that is to say, possessing some of the attributes and possibilities of friendship.
Gary, a slight glaze in his eyes as he listened to Fogel talk about writing, wanted, he seriously confessed with a worried brow, “more than anything,” even “desperately,” to be a writer—the desperation inciting goose bumps on Fogel’s flesh, putting him off for a full fifteen minutes. He sat in depressed silence in his office as the youth fidgeted. “What’s the rush?” the writer ultimately asked. “I’ve got to get there,” the youth replied. “Get where?” “I want to be a good writer someday, Mr. Fogel.” “It’s a long haul, my boy,” Eli Fogel said. “Make a friend of time. And steer clear of desperation. Desperate people tend to be bad writers, increasing desperation.” He laughed a little, not unkindly. Gary sat nodding as though he had learned the lesson of his life. He was twenty-two, a curly-haired senior in college, with a broad fleshy face and frame. On his appearance at the Buffalo conference he wore a full reddish mustache drooping down the sides of his thick-lipped mouth. He shaved it off on meeting Fogel and then grew it again later in the summer. He was six feet tall and his height and breadth made him look older than he was, if not wiser. For a while after his talk with Fogel he pretended to be more casual about his work, one who skirted excess and got it right. He pretended to be Fogel a bit, amusing Fogel. He had never had a disciple before and felt affection for the boy. Gary livened things up for the writer. One could see him in the distance, coming with his yellow guitar. He
strummed without distinction but sang fairly well, a tenor aspiring, related to art. “Sing me ‘Ochi Chornye,’ Gary,” Fogel said, and the youth obliged as the older man became pleasantly melancholic, thinking what if he’d had a son. Touch a hand to a guitar and Fogel had a wet eye. And Gary offered services as well as devoted attention: got books Fogel needed from the library; drove him into town when he had errands to do; could be depended on to retrieve forgotten lecture notes in his room—as if it were in compensation, though Fogel required none, for the privilege of sitting at his feet and plying him with questions about the art of fiction. Fogel, touched by his amiability, all he had yet to learn, by his own knowledge of the sadnesses of a writer’s life, invited him, usually with one or another of his friends, to his room for a drink before dinner. Gary brought along a thick notebook to jot down Fogel’s table talk. He showed him the first sentence he had copied down: “Imagination is not necessarily Id,” causing the writer when he read it to laugh uncomfortably. Gary laughed too. Fogel thought the note taking silly but didn’t object when Gary scribbled down long passages, although he doubted he had wisdom of any serious sort to offer. He was wiser in his work—one would be who revised often enough. He wished Gary would go to his books for answers to some of the questions he asked and stop treating poor Fogel like a guru.
“You can’t dissect a writer to learn what writing is or entails. One learns from experience, or should. I can’t teach anyone to be a writer, Gary—I’ve said that in my lectures. All I do here is talk about some things I’ve learned and hope somebody talented is listening. I always regret coming to these conferences.”
“You can give insights, can’t you?”
“Insights you can get from your mother.”
“More specifically, if I might ask, what do you think of my writing thus far, sir?”
Fogel reflected. “Promise you have—that’s all I can say now, but keep working.”
“What should I work most for?”
“Search possibility in and out and beyond the fact. I have the impression when I read your stories—the two in Buffalo and the
one you’ve given me here—that you remember or research too much. Memory is an ingredient, Gary, not the whole stew; and don’t make the error some do of living life as though it were a future fiction. Invent, my boy.”
“I’ll certainly try, Mr. Fogel.” He seemed worried.
Fogel lectured four mornings a week at eight-thirty so he could spend the rest of the day at work. His large bright room in a guest house close to a pine grove, whose fragrance he breathed as he wrote on a cracked table by a curtained window, was comfortable even on hot afternoons. He worked every day, half day on Sundays, quitting as a rule around four; then soaked in a smallish stained tub, dressed leisurely, whistling through his teeth, in a white flannel suit fifteen years in service, and waited, holding a book before his nose, for someone to come for a drink. During the last week of the White Mountain conference he saw Gary each night. Sometimes they drove to a movie in town, or walked after supper along a path by a stream, the youth stopping to jot down in his notebook sentences given off by Fogel, chaff as well as grain. They went on until the mosquitoes thickened or Fogel’s limp began to limp. He wore a Panama hat, slightly yellowed, and white shoes he whitened daily, one with a higher heel than the other. Fogel’s pouched dark eyes, even as he spoke animatedly, were contemplative, and he listened with care to Gary though he didn’t always hear. In the last year or two he had lost weight and his white suit hung on his shoulders. He looked small by Gary’s side, although he was shorter by only three inches. And once the youth, in a burst of vitality or affection, his one imaginative act of the summer, lifted Fogel at the hips and held him breathless in the air. The writer gazed into Gary’s gold-flecked eyes; that he found them doorless to the self filled him with remorse.
Or Gary drove them in his noisy Peugeot to a small piano-playing bar by a crossroads several miles the other side of town, sometimes in the company of one or two students, occasionally a colleague but usually students; and this made it a fuller pleasure because Fogel enjoyed being with women. Gary, who had a talent for acquiring pretty girls, one night brought along one of the loveliest Fogel had ever seen. The girl, about twenty-five, with streaked
dyed-blond and dark hair wore a red dress on her long-waisted body, the breasts ample, loose, her buttocks shapely, sweet. A rare find indeed; but the youth, senseless, sullen, or stoned, gave her scant attention. He glanced at her once in a while as if trying to remember where he had met her. Sad-eyed, she drank Scotch on the rocks, gnawing her lip as she watched his eyes roving over the dancers on the floor. Too bad she doesn’t know how much I appreciate her, Fogel mused.
Where does he get so many attractive girls—he had been equally effective in Buffalo—and why doesn’t he bring the same one two nights running? This blessed creature in red would last me half a lifetime. The youth’s taste in women could not be faulted—but he seemed, after a short time, unmoved by them and yawned openly, although it was rumored he enjoyed an active heterosexual life. He has so many and goes through them so quickly—where does he think one learns longing? Where does poetry come from? She’s too good for him, he thought, not knowing exactly why, unless she was good for
him
. Ah youth, ah summer. Once again he seriously considered the possibility of marriage. After all, how old is forty-six—not, in any case,
old
. A good twenty-five or thirty years to go, enough to raise a family.
On what?
For his companion Fogel had asked along a schoolteacher from his class, a Miss Rudel from Manhattan, unmarried but not lacking a sense of humor; nor did she take her dabbling in fiction seriously, a pleasant change from the desperate ladies who haunted the conference. But he looked her over and found her wanting, then found himself wanting.
Perhaps because the evening had acquired a sexual tone he remembered Lucy Matthews, a desperate writer presently attending his lectures. About a week ago, after going through a shoe box full of exasperating stories she had left with him, representing the past year’s work, he had told her bluntly, “Miss Matthews, let’s not pretend that writing is a substitute for talent.” And when she quietly gasped, cracking the knuckles of one hand, then of the other, he went on: “If you are out to save your soul, there are better ways.”
The lady gazed bleakly at Fogel; a slim woman with fair figure, tense neck, and anxious eyes.
“But, Mr. Fogel, how does one go about finding out the extent of her talent? Some of my former professors told me I write capable stories, yet you seem to think I’m hopeless.” Tears brimmed in her eyes.
Fogel was about to soften his judgment but warned himself it would be less than honest to encourage her. She was from Cedar Falls and this was her fourth conference of the summer. He vowed again to give them up forever.
Lucy Matthews plucked a Kleenex out of her handbag and quietly cried, waiting for perhaps a good word, but the writer, sitting in silence, had none to offer. She got up and hurriedly left the office.
But at ten o’clock that night, dressed in a taffeta party dress, her hair brushed into a bright sheen, briskly perfumed, Lucy tapped on Fogel’s house door. Accepting his surprised invitation to enter, after three silent sips of bourbon and water, she lifted her noisy dress over her head and stood there naked.
“Mr. Fogel,” she whispered passionately, “you aren’t afraid to tell the truth. Your work represents art. I feel that if I could hold you in my arms I would be close to both—art and truth.”
“It just isn’t so,” Fogel replied as he fought off the feeling that he had stepped into a Sherwood Anderson story. “I would like to sleep with you, frankly, but not for the reasons stated. If you had said, ‘Fogel, you may be an odd duck but you’ve aroused me tonight and I would gladly go to bed with you’—could you say that?”
“If you prefer fellation—” Lucy whispered tensely.
“Thank you kindly,” he said with tenderness, “I prefer the embrace of a woman. Would you care to answer my question?”
Shivering around the shoulders, Lucy Matthews came to her finest moment at writing conferences.
“I can’t truly say so.”
“Ah, too bad,” Fogel sighed. “Anyway, I’m privileged you saw fit to undress in my presence.”
She slipped on the dress at her feet and departed. Fogel especially regretted the loss because the only woman he had slept with
that summer, a young chambermaid in a Buffalo hotel he had stayed at in June, had hurt him dreadfully.
“Are you dreaming about something, Mr. Fogel?” Gary asked.
“Only vaguely,” Fogel replied.
“An idea for a story, I bet?”
“It may come to that.”
When the conference ended, Gary, waiting outside the lecture barn to take Fogel to the train, asked him, “Will I ever be a good writer, do you think, Mr. Fogel?”
“It depends on commitment. You’ll have to prove yourself.”
“I will if you have faith in me.”
“Even if I have no faith in you. Who is Eli Fogel, after all, but a man trying to make his own way through the woods.”
Fogel smiled at the youth and, though not knowing exactly why, felt he had to say, “One must grow spirit, Gary.”
The youth blinked in the strong sunlight.
“I’m glad we’re both writers, Mr. Fogel.”
The next spring, a wet springtime, Fogel, wandering in a damp hat and coat in the periodical room of the New York Public Library, without forethought plucked off the shelf a college magazine and came upon Gary Simson in the table of contents, as the author of a story called “Travails of a Writer.” He was surprised because they were in correspondence and Gary hadn’t told him he had published his first story. Maybe it wasn’t such a good one? Reading it quickly Fogel found it wasn’t; but that wasn’t why Gary hadn’t mentioned it. The reason depressed him.