AFTER that we were fast friends. With Val around, everything seemed to take on life. She had a magical art of being able to instill a third dimension into things and make them more interesting than they had been before. To me her life was a continuous drama, full of heroic emotion, with piano chords crashing in the background, colorful people running in and out, and an incredibly complicated plot. Things were always happening to her. If they didn’t have the proper elements of epic drama, she would add them in the retelling; but usually she didn’t have to, because Val made drama wherever she went. She didn’t merely walk down the stairs at Norton; she would leap down, three steps at a time, with me at her heels, and the whole venture took on traumatic proportions. A piano lesson might have been a commonplace event to someone else, but to Val it was a psychological purge, a trip into nirvana in which her genius would take over and she would have a soul-meeting with Mr. Drago. Mr. Drago was probably unaware of all the furore he caused, but that didn’t matter. Even Mrs. Cooney, whom I had barely noticed, became a gay old bird who was prone to early morning conferences on the subject of psychiatry, and who (Val said) was considering going to one herself. Val gave the impression that she lived in a sort of wheel-like society with herself at the hub. The members of this chosen group were a rather odd collection. I was the only one who was a contemporary of hers, and the others consisted of Mr. Drago, Dr. Braintree (the psychiatrist), Emma Hambler, a janitor at Carnegie Hall, a salesman at Liberty Music Shop, Mrs. Cooney, and a ballet-dancing Hungarian who sometimes visited the Hamblers. All of us theoretically rotated around Val, giving our opinions of her, which were always good. If anyone missed a cue, and seemed to be more interested in his own life than Val’s, she would be deeply hurt; if he dropped her altogether, she would shrug it off, implying that his life would be considerably emptier and duller without her. This was certainly true, though I don’t think Val really believed it at the time. Each of us satisfied some need in her, and added up, I suppose, to a composite person, her opposite number. She took whatever we had to give her; inspiration from Mr. Drago, love from Emma Hambler, free concerts in the wings by courtesy of the janitor, knowledge of her own mind from Dr. Braintree, companionship and admiration from me. In return, we had the privilege of knowing her; and this was enough. For anyone who got to know her well had a nagging desire to help her. She seemed so lost, so wistful in her big coat, so bright and malleable, so alone, that everyone wanted to take the tiger lily from the field and plant it in a proper garden.
Her parents did little to remedy this, as they were hardly ever around. Gradually I learned more about them. According to Val, they were fabulously rich, glamorous creatures, who leaped on and off planes between Paris, Cuba, New York, Bombay and Hollywood, all to a tinkle of diamonds and champagne glasses. Occasionally a large check or a package of expensive clothes would arrive from them, or more rarely, a letter. Usually Val was rather vague about them—they seemed to live everywhere, to do everything and to know everybody. They appeared occasionally in the gossip columns, where they were found by Boothy, having been seen at Romanoff’s or the Nationale in Havana. But it was a life Val did not share with them, and she remembered her family best as riding with her father in the mountains of Oregon. She clung to that; it was one of the few things she had that any other child might have had. But behind every phase of her life was the shadow of Dr. Braintree.
“What’s she like?” I asked Val one Saturday afternoon, as we walked home along Central Park South after seeing a movie.
“Oh, she’s a good egg, underneath it all,” Val said. “She looks stone-faced when she has her professional manner on. But afterwards, when we have tea, she relaxes and tells jokes.”
“You have tea there?” I asked, surprised. I had envisioned Val spending her hour on a hard stool, with a naked lightbulb overhead, and Dr. Braintree in a uniform. “Could I meet her sometime?”
“Well, I asked her if I could bring you, and she said no. She doesn’t want to meet any of my friends. She’s afraid of being biased about me.”
“Hasn’t she ever met Emma? Or your parents?”
Val shook her head. “She was just recommended by people, and off I went. The school I got kicked out of recommended her. She likes to do things that way.”
“How funny,” I said. “What on earth do you talk to her about?”
“Oh, anything. She’s a Freudian. I tell her my dreams, or what I think of my teachers, or what I think of anybody. Or my childhood. Sometimes we don’t talk about me at all, just about movies or music or horses.”
“Do you tell her everything you think or do?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” Val replied. “Some things aren’t any of her business, that’s all. Let’s go into that drugstore and have hot chocolate.”
We had nothing to do with the rest of the Norton girls, nor they with us. Their week end adventures paled beside ours. All they had done was to go to a dance with burping Trinity boys, while we had made friends with a tramp in Morningside Park who turned out to be a frustrated oboe player, had tea with two pansy friends of Val’s who ran a lampshade shop, seen a Chinese movie on the Bowery, taught a group of children in a playground to play prison ball, or spent an afternoon in one of the booths at Liberty’s playing records, aided by the obliging salesman. The city turned out to have unheard-of depths, and we plumbed all that our age and circumstances permitted. If one of our escapades seemed shady, such as our encounter with the tramp (friendly though he was), Val would make up a gentle lie for my mother and Emma as to our whereabouts for the afternoon. She was adept at this, which I found a little shocking at first, but I soon got used to it. To enhance our adventures, we took to new and unique ways of doing everyday things. It was too boring to just walk along a street or talk in plain English. Val made up a little dance to go with a Mozart gavotte, and we gavotted down the street, singing to the music. This led to other things, and we developed weaving and splitsing. To weave, you chose a very crowded block, like Broadway and Forty-fourth, and thundered along it at top speed, weaving in and out of the people; the only rule was that you had to choose the longest way around any one person, rather than the shortest. Val liked to weave through moving traffic, but I could never bring myself to that. Splitsing was derived from prison ball, and it meant you rose in the air, legs apart, and let the missile (whatever it was) go underneath. We started out by splitsing the tennis balls, notebooks and extra shoes that Val carried around with her, but branched out to bigger things. One day Val came triumphantly into the classroom saying she’d just splitsed a little boy on a tricycle. She’d been cantering down the street in her usual manner, and when she saw the little boy she couldn’t stop in time, so she splitsed him. His mother had been astonished, but they got to talking, and it turned out she was a harpist, and invited Val to tea. With all this constant practice, we did attract a certain amount of admiration at prison ball, but aside from that, the other Norton girls thought us mad. We both got good marks, but we were constantly being called in to Miss Rollyman’s office because of our lack of discipline. Miss Rollyman would sigh, shift her bony jaw, and flip two file cards on her spotless desk.
“Boyd and Gilbert again,” she would say, calling us always by our last names, with that peculiar assumption of masculinity headmistresses often get. “I hear you two started a ruckus in the cafeteria yesterday. Throwing apples at each other, or something. Very funny. You each get a warning.” Three warnings meant you went before Student Council, but Val always managed to talk her way out of it just when such a fate seemed inevitable, and somehow drag me out too. Norton being somewhat progressive, we had Remarks on our report cards, and they usually said we were bright enough but we had Undesirable Friends. Conferences with my mother and Emma ensued, during which Val said we were misunderstood and we were actually marvelous influences on each other. She pointed out to my mother that whereas I had previously been sort of a drip (she said it more tactfully), since I had become friends with her I had come out of myself and begun to participate in the world around me. My mother smiled at this, but it was true enough. Besides, she liked Val, and was willing to put up with the screaming and splitsing just to have her around and to hear her play the piano. Emma knew that Val needed a friend more than anything else; she also knew, paradoxically, that I was one of the few people who did not constantly scrutinize Val, as though she were an object under a microscope.
“She has too much of that,” she said to me one day. “All her life it has been intelligence tests, aptitude tests, personality tests. She was becoming too interested in Val, and you snap her out of that. The two of you drive me wild sometimes, but I like to see her happy.” But she kept reading her books on psychiatry, as though she couldn’t stop herself, just as at certain moments I found myself lapsing into a nagging curiosity about Val and the many things that still weren’t explained about her. I hated myself for doing it, and tried to make myself think of her as just anybody. But with Val, it seemed impossible.
She was utterly unpredictable. There was always the vague possibility that she might, for no reason that I could divine, suddenly disappear. Occasionally she did. One day, when we were looking through the postcards and prints in the Museum of Modern Art, Val mumbled behind me, “I have to do something.” I didn’t pay any attention for a few minutes, and when I finally turned around, she was gone. I went outside and walked up to Fifth, but didn’t see her. I wandered around, and then asked a policeman about her. After a while I gave up and went home. I felt hurt, and it meant the waste of a precious Saturday.
“Maybe she was playing splits with one of the Rouaults, and they took her away to juvenile court,” Boothy suggested when I told about it in the kitchen. She and my mother were making canapes for a cocktail party, and they weren’t paying much attention. “Or maybe the spirit moved her to go and commune with her alter ego. Who knows?” Boothy was covering small pieces of toast with anchovy paste. “Remember when she spent two hours here the other day sitting under the piano? We can’t repress her, because we’d cause some terrible psychosis to form.”
“Oh, Boothy, you make her sound like a freak,” I said, irritatedly bouncing a tennis ball.
“Not a freak, just...uninhibited.”
“Dear, would you mind putting some cigarettes in these boxes? That’s an angel.”
The electric blender was whirring, the cake-mixer was whizzing, something was boiling on the stove, and my mother was knocking ice out of ice trays; I could hardly hear myself think.
“But suppose something happened to her?” I shouted, as my mother turned on the faucet, full blast, to loosen the ice.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, and gave up.
When I asked her where she’d gone, she said she’d gone into Liberty’s to hear a concerto; she’d looked for me, but thought I’d guess where she was. So I learned that if she felt like disappearing, there was nothing anybody could do about it; if pressed, she would lie. The old feeling of annoyance came back that Val had more resources than I did, and when she wasn’t around, I was bored; whereas she could get along very well by herself. To fortify myself, I took to reading novels, which Val never did, determined to have something I knew about which she didn’t, something to excel in. I would start long and affected dissertations on Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, only to find them cold and dull beside Val, and I would give up and we would go off on another escapade.
But most of the time, there was harmony. I remember one day that we spent in the Village, going in and out of art galleries and playing checkers with a nice old man in Washington Square park. When Val beat him, he bowed gravely and thanked us, and walked away with his cane through the gentle twilight. We both sat there, sprawled on a bench; it was November, but curiously spring-like. The grass shimmered and the Arch looked ancient and opulent, like something of another age. Through the dusk the lobbies of the hotels threw gold spots on the street.
“You know,” Val said suddenly—she was given to confidences in the dark, when her face was invisible—“I’ve never told anybody half the things I’ve told you. You’re my best friend. It’s funny...but you don’t know yet what you believe about anything, so you aren’t shocked by Dr. Braintree. You know how the rest of the Eights would act, if they knew. But you just sort of accept everything. It’s because you live in your imagination, so nothing that happens in real life surprises you.”
“Oh, doesn’t it?” I asked, fumbling for something to say. I was thoroughly unaccustomed to character analysis. I was immensely flattered, but suspected that what she was saying was not entirely complimentary. Did she think I was a dope? A faithful old retainer? But I’d wondered it before, and resigned myself to the answer; what I got out of this friendship was what she happened to drop by the wayside, reflected light from her own life, nothing more. And again I knew, as I had known before, that that was enough. All I could say now—that since I had known her, I had emerged into the real world—would be a devastating compliment for her, probably just what she was waiting for, and just what I refused to give. So I said nothing, and just looked at her. She looked, as she so often did, like a wet puppy, and I suddenly blamed myself for thinking evil of her. She’s lost and lonely, and she’s saying I’m her best friend. How mean I am, reading anything else into it. But what was there about Val that made it so impossible to take anything she said at face value?
“Emma is impressed by you,” Val went on musingly. “She says you’re remarkably naïve. She was so surprised when I told her about your parents being divorced, and all. She said that usually snaps children up in some way.” Her words were hypnotic; how often had anyone ever thought about me, and what I was, before? At home I was a helpless creature caught between two frantically energetic women; at school I was another little girl in a gym tunic, and even the remarks on my report cards were duller than anyone else’s. To Val I was something, anyway, if only a cottonhead.
“But I’m getting less naïve,” I said, hardly realizing I was talking out loud. “Sometimes I do things that...really aren’t so naïve at all.” I suddenly remembered about Lilian, and the way I had handled her. I had never told Val about it, and didn’t think it would be a good idea. But that action had been brought on by Val too. Was I responsible to her for everything?
“Oh, of course you do,” Val said, like a mother talking to a child. “I didn’t mean to sound insulting, or anything. Not at all! I like you better than anybody, I said. I can really talk to you, about almost anything. Of course, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me.”
“Are there?” I asked, curious again. I longed for the faculty of disinterestedness, but I didn’t have it. “What things?”
“You don’t know anything about my family, you know,” she said. She giggled, suddenly embarrassed by all this confidence. “You’ll find out, soon enough.” She got up, as though she couldn’t sit still another moment, and ran across the grass. “Splits!” she shouted, brandishing a tennis ball. She threw it and I splitsed it, then we raced over to the street to get the Fifth Avenue bus.
One night after dinner I phoned Val, as I did frequently. We spent a good deal of time on the phone, and had some of our most interesting conversations there. I sprawled on my mother’s satin bedspread and kicked off my sneakers.
“Hello?” said a voice. There was wild music going on in the background.
“Hi, it’s me. What are you doing?”
“It’s Bartók. He does things to me. His dissonances are positively pathological.”
“Did you make that up?”
She giggled. “Yeah. Intellectual, isn’t it?”
“Fascinating. Listen, Mom wants to know if we want to go to a concert Friday night. Somebody named Henry Orient is playing at Carnegie.” I was looking at the Times. “‘Henry Orient, a newcomer to the concert stage, has technical versatility and enthusiasm, but lacks the finesse and discrimination of a true artist. Subtlety and nuance are lessons he has yet to learn.’”
“Oh, I see. Schmaltz. I’ve heard of him. He’s been trying to get a concert in New York for years. Sure, let’s go.”
“Okay, I’ll tell Mom. We’ll go with her and Boothy, probably. She says we should wear dresses.”
“Dresses! I don’t even have a dress.”
“Fooey, sure you do. I have one I can tolerate.”
“We don’t have to wear stockings, do we?”
“Of course not. She just wants us to look neat, that’s all.”
“I’ll...” Val began, but Bartók reached a crescendo, and I couldn’t understand. We shouted back and forth for a while, then Boothy wanted to use the phone, so we hung up.
Val came to dinner Friday, she in her dress and I in mine. We sat sedately at the table, over beef Stroganoff, with milk for us and “a neurotic little wine,” as Boothy called it, for the grownups.
“I met Henry Orient, years ago, in Hollywood,” Boothy said. “He’s one of those people who won’t take a bath. His agent kept trying to scrub him up, but it didn’t work.”
“You girls should like him,” my mother said. “I can see a kinship already.”
“Mom, I think that’s mean,” I said. “Kindly notice the pains we’ve taken to look nice this evening. Val even shaved her legs.”
“Gilbert, you are the worst blabbermouth,” Val said, glaring at me. “Emma would have a fit if she knew. She says I’m too young.”
“Now that you’ve started, you have to keep doing it,” Boothy said. “Otherwise, bristles.”
“You really shouldn’t have, Val,” my mother said. “It’s not as though you’re terribly hairy.”
“Like Lilian Kafritz,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Boothy asked.
“A creep,” I said.
“Mrs. Gilbert, please don’t tell Emma.”
“I won’t, dear. She’ll probably notice anyway, though.”
Val was looking thoughtfully at my mother. “I can’t stand to call you Mrs. Gilbert anymore,” she said. “I’d like to call you Wimpole.”
“Good God,” Boothy said. “Why Wimpole?”
“She just looks like Wimpole, and acts like Wimpole. I can’t explain it.”
“Do I?” my mother asked. “Funny, it’s never occurred to me.”
“Your maiden name was Wimpleton, so you’re Wimpole. I know you too well to say Mrs. Gilbert, and I can’t call you Avis. So something in the middle is needed.”
“I’ve always felt that,” Boothy said.
“I think it’s a good idea, Mom. You aren’t a Mom or an Avis, really.”
“Don’t repress her, Wimpole,” Boothy said. “You might cause a backfire.”
“Boothy, that’s not funny,” I said, but Val was laughing.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “I’m sick of being sensitive. Boothy’s in the proper spirit. Can I have a glass of wine, Wimpole?”
“I don’t think so,” Wimpole said. “Marian can’t, so neither can you.”
“I have a feeling things are going to change around here,” Boothy said. “We’ll all have so many names, we won’t know who’s who.”
“Just Wimpole,” Val said.
“We’d better go,” Wimpole said. “It’s twenty after.”
“Cheers,” Boothy said, gulping down the rest of her wine. “Why don’t you girls run out and flag a cab?”
The lobby at Carnegie was steamy and crowded, with the smell of wet fur and radiators. There was a line at the ticket window, and more people were coming in from the street, stamping their feet, as it had begun to snow. Val looked around interestedly.
“I don’t see Harmon,” she said.
“Who’s Harmon?” Boothy asked. “Is his name really Joe Smith?”
Val laughed. “No, it’s really Harmon, and he’s the janitor here. He’s a friend of mine. I suppose he’s backstage tonight.” “The floor’s dirty,” Boothy said. “He’s a slacker.”
“Oh, he doesn’t really like being a janitor. He’s above it. He’s only here for the music. If he likes the performer, he stays back, so he can hear better. Funny, I shouldn’t think he’d like Orient.”
There was a poster of Henry Orient on the wall. He was fat and bushy-haired, with a pouting lower lip.
“Here he is, Val.”
“He wouldn’t win any beauty contest,” Val said, looking at him with interest.
Wimpole fished through her purse for the tickets, and we stood in line to go in.
“Just think, Val,” Wimpole said, lapsing into one of her frequent philosophical digressions, “this is the world you will belong to some day. Here are the makers of music...that man over there is undoubtedly a critic, covering the concert for tomorrow’s paper. And that one with the moustache is probably a composer. Perhaps Mr. Orient is playing one of his compositions. He will sit there, weighing every note, judging it, with an ear sharp and sensitive as a needle, wincing when a phrase is not played exactly as he intended it. And that man over there with the white hair is probably an old retired...”
“Harmon,” Val said. “I guess he changed his mind. Hi, Harmon,” she called, waving at him. “Schmaltz, huh?”
Harmon nodded and winked.
“And inside,” Wimpole continued, “the harpist is plucking her strings, the cellists are bracing their instruments between their knees at exactly the right angle, and even the cymbalist is making sure he knows where to come in, for although his part is small, it’s crucial...”
“Wimpole gets carried away,” I said to Val.
“How about the man at the chair-backs? This is modern music,” Val said, grinning wickedly. “And there’s a place where a man strikes a match on the sole of his shoe. Small, but crucial.”
Boothy burst out laughing. “Val, you mesmerize me,” she said.
“You’re all cynics,” Wimpole said. “I’m just trying to open your eyes to the things around you, and you laugh.”
“I’m sorry,” Val said penitently. “Honestly. It’s just that I don’t think I’ll ever make this world.”
“If you try, Val, you can do anything. You have the gift, the rest is up to you.”
“It isn’t, Wimpole. It never was, and it never will be.”
“Tickets are requested,” Boothy said. “No tickee, no Henry.”
We went inside and found our seats, which were in the fourth row.
“I’ve never sat this close before,” Val said.
“Just think,” Boothy said. “We’ll be able to see every pulsating muscle. Maybe we’ll even be able to smell him.”
The orchestra was a confusion of muted noises, hands moving over instruments. The conductor came, mounted the podium and bowed.
“What’s the first?” I asked.
“Concerto by Khatchaturian,” Wimpole replied.
There was a stir, and we all watched the stage. The huge concert grand stood in front, polished, we assumed, by Harmon. The last sound was gone from the audience; the maestro bowed to the wings, and Henry Orient walked out. He strode over to the piano, like a small fat soldier, flipped out his coattails, and sat down.
“Look at the color of his hair,” I whispered to Val. “It’s like a tangerine.”
But Val was watching him closely and didn’t hear me. Henry Orient clamped the edges of the bench with his hands, at the same time undulating on the bench in the most curious way. He stared at the ceiling, and his forehead shone with perspiration.
“He looks fairly clean,” I whispered to Boothy.
“Shhh!” Val hissed angrily. I glanced at her in surprise, and the music started, the violins building gently, and then Henry began to play.
The music was modern and strange, but I liked it. It went on and on, as concertos do. I listened, interested, then wiggled a little, glancing around. Perhaps this would be Val’s world, some day. Perhaps I would be in this same seat, listening to her play. She said she didn’t have enough talent; was it truth or modesty? Neither Boothy nor Wimpole knew enough about music to know if she were just good or really great, and I certainly didn’t. Maybe nobody could tell. Boothy blew her nose and wiped her purple glasses, while Wimpole sat with her hands folded in her lap, serene and intent. But Val was literally on the edge of her seat, her hands on the chair as Henry’s had been on his bench. Her mouth was open slightly, and once her hands flew into fists in front of her, as though she were catching two bugs at once. She seemed to be in an acutely emotional state, and I had no idea what was the matter with her.
“What is it?” I whispered. “You look like you’re having a trauma.”
The look she gave me was cutting, pitying and patronizing, as though I were a tiresome old drunk who was bothering her. Wimpole nudged me and said to be quiet. The concerto ended and Henry Orient bowed, flipped his coattails and strode off the stage. Val dropped back in her seat.
“Wow,” she said softly, instead of applauding.
“How about an orange drink?” suggested Boothy, who apparently hadn’t noticed any of this. “I’m parched.”
We went out into the lobby and bought orangeades. Val was silent, leaning against the wall, her face wistful.
“Well, I think he’s very good,” said my mother. “He really throws himself into it, you might say. The last movement was really exciting.”
Val was watching her from her half-darkened corner, and there was a tiny, secret smile on her face. I frowned at her and spun my finger in a circle around my ear. She ignored me, saying:
“I think he needs to spend an hour a day on scales.”
“What do you mean, Val? Doesn’t he have good technique?”
“Well, yes, but he...no, he doesn’t. I mean...” She stopped, and we all stared at her.
“Easy, girl,” Boothy said. “Have another orangeade.”
Val grunted, and lapsed back in her corner. I continued to stare at her, and Wimpole talked about the bygone days of Carnegie. Back in her seat, Val brooded. She often had moods, but this one seemed extreme.
“You must think he’s marvelous,” I began experimentally. “You seem all carried away, or something.”
“Do I?” said Val innocently. “Oh, I’m sorry. He isn’t great, like Kapell or Casadesus. He’s interesting, you might say...he’s a good pop pianist.” Her words were noncommittal, but her face belied her.
“Come on, Val,” I said softly, as the sounds were dying down. “Cough it up. What is it? Are you in love with him, or something?”
She looked up slowly, her face astonished, then began to grin. One eyebrow went up slightly.
“Bœuf sur le Toit—Milhaud,” whispered Boothy. “Beef on the roof.”
Val looked back to the stage, where Henry Orient was striding again to the piano, and leaned forward, clutching her program. I sat back in my seat and laughed very softly.