WE FIRST SAW HER, Mrs. Hawthorn, sitting alone, the first one down in the tender that waited to take us off the Bermuda boat. She was wearing a quilted taffeta suit, expensively flared at shoulder and hip, and a matching hat—one of those deep, real hats we were all wearing in the fall of 1935—and her arms were full, crammed full of tea roses. Under a city marquee, she would have had an enviable chic, but on the white deck of the tender, in the buttery Bermuda sun, she looked outlandishly urban for that travel-folder scene. As the rest of us climbed down into the tender, she made room for us with an apologetic shifting of the roses, but one could see, as she nestled her long, rouge-assisted face into the buds, that she was pleased with them.
Later on, in the week that followed, we saw her at our hotel, and Luke and I, drifting in the ambience of our honeymooners’ table, idly watched her dinner entrances. Each evening, appearing late but consciously unflurried, in a different gown—one always too dominantly colorful and sparkling for the off-season crowd—she crossed to the table reserved for her and her companion, a dark, pear-shaped man, shorter than she, who received her with an anxious, hesitant courtesy.
On the first evening, Luke, nudging me, had pointed to the single bird-of-paradise bud with which the hotel kept the tables adorned, each beaked bloom soaring from its coarse glass holder like an immoderately hued bird, and every evening thereafter, the analogy had kept us amused. One evening, however, as she passed us, her tall, haggard figure sheathed in green sequins that boomeranged the light, a child at a nearby table cried out: “Look, Mommy! Christmas tree!” As she stopped, and bent toward the child, the sequins not quite concealing the middle-aged line from breast to hip, we heard her say, in a mellow voice, as if she were indulgently amused at both the child and herself—“Yes, darling! Christmas tree!”—and we felt ashamed, and liked her.
We met the two of them again, as we were all herded docilely into one of the glass-bottomed sightseeing boats, and she told us her name. The little man, tentative and deferential in the background, was one of those hovering people whose names one never catches, and we never did, although she told us it too. Again we saw her, alone on the beach in front of the hotel, in a maillot that was still somewhat scandalous for that time. We were a little embarrassed for her, not at the suit, but at its cruel, sagging revelation, and I remember that both of us, looking away with the instinctive distaste of the young for the fading, glanced down with satisfaction at our own bodies. One of her arms was almost covered from wrist to elbow with diamond and sapphire bracelets, and she must have seen me staring at them, or trying not to. She laughed, on the same mellow note.
“I’d feel naked without them.” She turned, and slid into the water. She swam well, better than either of us, her long, water-sallowed face, which once must have been very handsome, sinking deep into the fervid blue of the water, the one mailed arm flashing in the sun.
In those days, the thing to do was to go down on the Monarch and come back on the Queen. The little stenographers squandering their vacation on off-season rates, an “interchangeable” wardrobe, and one shattering evening dress, the honey-mooners, intent on seeming otherwise, all said it airily: “We came down on the Monarch and will go back on the Queen.” On the return voyage, we met Mrs. Hawthorn and her vague companion again. The ship had run into bad weather, the usual October storms of the Caribbean, and at dinnertime, the little stenographers had been unable to appear in their evening dresses after all.
Luke had been affected too, although I was not. After dinner alone, I wandered into one of the ornate lounges that hollowed the ship. Seated in one of the gold chairs, her lamé gown blending so well that at first I did not see her, was Mrs. Hawthorn. She beckoned to me.
“I see you’re a good sailor, too,” she said. “I never get sick. Dave—the friend who is traveling with me—is down in his cabin.” There was the slightest emphasis on “his.” “Women are the stronger sex, I always say. You two are newlyweds, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Look,” she said. “Why don’t you and your husband come up to my stateroom and have champagne. It’s the best thing in the world for seasickness—and after all we really should celebrate for you two. Yes, do! We really must!”
I went down to our cabin, and roused Luke. “You think you’re inveigling me,” he said. “But it’s really Mrs. Hawthorn who intrigues me.”
We climbed the ladders from D deck to A. Up there, with no feel of more ship above us, the ocean, silhouetted against the looming slant of the stacks, seemed to shift its dark obliques more pervasively near us.
“The water seems more intimate up here with the rich, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Hmmm,” said Luke, “but it’s not an intimacy I care to develop at the moment.” I giggled, and lurching together, hip to hip, half with love, half with the movement of the deck, we entered Mrs. Hawthorn’s stateroom.
The room was banked with flowers. Mrs. Hawthorn and her companion were waiting for us, sitting stiffly in the center of the blooms like unintroduced visitors in the anteroom of a funeral chapel. Wedged behind a coffee table blocked with bottles, Mrs. Hawthorn did not rise, but we greeted each other with that air of confederate gaiety adopted by hostess and guest at parties of whose success neither is sure. Across from her, behind an imitation hearth, a gas log burned insolently, as if a fireplace burning in the middle of the sea might serve to keep the elements in their place.
“Life on the hypotenuse,” said Luke. He retrieved a bunch of gladioli, and set them back on the erring horizontal of a table.
Mrs. Hawthorn shifted her bracelets. “Dave is the florist in our home town—Hawthornton, Connecticut. I needed a rest, so Dave came down with me. Senator Hawthorn couldn’t get away. He’s the senator from there, you know.”
Luke and I nodded, eager to let her see that we took her explanation at its face value, unwilling to appear abashed at the malpractices of the rich and worn. I imagined her life—the idle, probably childless woman, burdened with an exuberance no longer matched by her exterior, drawing toward her, with the sequins of wealth and difference, the self-conscious little man, who was doggedly trying to fill the gap between them with the only largesse at his command—his abracadabra of flowers. Luke and I exchanged looks across the flowers, secure in our cocoon of beginnings, seeing before us an itinerary that repudiated compromise, and made no concessions to the temporal.
As we drank, the fraudulent solidity of the room was displaced now and again by a deep, visceral sway that drained the chair arms from beneath our digging fingers, and the wine seemed only to accentuate the irrationality of the four of us so transiently, so unsuitably met. At one point, Mrs. Hawthorn told the blond, mild-featured Luke that he had a “sulphurous” look, which roused us all to unsteady laughter, and again I remember her asking, with the gaucherie so denied by her appearance, if he were a “college man.”
Then, suddenly, with an incredulous look on his face, Dave, the little man, stood up. Edging backwards, he felt for the doorknob, caught it, and disappeared around it. Ignoring his defection, the three of us sat on; then Luke, with a wild look at me, lurched through the flapping door and was gone.
Mrs. Hawthorn and I sat on for a moment, united in that smug matriarchy which joins women whose men have acted similarly and disgracefully. The heat from the burning log brought out the reek of the flowers, until it seemed to me that I had drunk perfume instead of champagne. Slowly the log up-ended and pointed toward the ceiling, but this too had slid far to the right, so that the room hung in a momentary armistice with the storm, the implacable hearth still glowing in its center. I stood up, and moved toward the door. It sidled toward me, and I achieved the corridor, but not before I had caught a last glimpse of Mrs. Hawthorn. She was sitting there like one of those children one often sees at dusk in the playground or the corner lot, still concentrated in fierce, solitary energy on the spinning top or the chalked squares of the deserted game, unwilling to admit the default of the others who have wilted, conceded in the afternoon’s end, and acquiescently gone home.
By the time Luke and I had made our separate ways to the cabin, the ship had ridden out the storm area and was running smoothly. We would dock next morning in New York Harbor. We greeted each other, and slid limply into bed. Luke put his arms around me with a protectiveness tinged, I could not help thinking, with a relief that I had not proved so indomitable after all. For a second, I held him at arm’s length. “Tell me first,” I said. “Are you a college man?” Then we nestled together, in the excluding, sure laughter of the young.
At the docking the next day, we got through the lines early, without seeing anyone we knew. We had exchanged addresses with Mrs. Hawthorn, never really expecting to see her again, and in the busy weeks after, during which we returned to our jobs and our life together, we forgot her completely.
About a month later, sometime in November, we got a note from her, written in a large, wasteful hand on highly colored, expensive notepaper, and followed, when we did not immediately answer, by a phone call, during which her voice came over the wire as gaily insistent as before. Would we come up for dinner and stay the night? We accepted without particular consideration, partly out of a reawakened interest in her and what she would be like at home with the Senator, and partly because it was a place to go with the Chevy—and no sense of the stringency of time had led us as yet to a carping evaluation of the people with whom we spent it.
On the way up that Saturday, a run of about seventy miles, we drove steadily through a long, umber autumn afternoon. At our left the sun dropped slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the escarpments of pines and firs were black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights popped up in the soiled gray backs of towns, and a presage of winter tingled in our minds, its remembered icicle sliding down our spines. I was twenty-two, free, still catching up with a childhood where hot dogs had been forbidden. I made Luke stop for them twice. After that we drove silently, my head on Luke’s shoulder. Inside the chugging little car, the heater warmed us; we were each with the one necessary person; we had made love the night before.
At seven, when we were expected, we were still twenty miles away. Luke stopped to phone. He came back to the car. “She says dinner will wait for us, not to rush. We’re to go on to a night club afterwards.”
In a second my mind had raked over everything in my suitcase, had placed me at the dinner table—perhaps not quite at the Senator’s right—had moved me on to the little round table on the dance floor.
“I just remembered,” I said. “I didn’t put in my evening shoes.”
“I just remembered,” said Luke. “I didn’t bring a proper tie.”
We burst into laughter, “We’ll swing round by way of New London,” said Luke. “We can get things there.”
When we got to the main street of the town, it was crowded, but the clothing stores were closing. Luke rushed into a haberdashery shop and came out with a tie. At the dark end of the shopping district we found a shoe store whose proprietor, counting stock in his dim interior, opened his locked door. I bought a pair of silver, girl-graduate sandals, the first pair he showed me. “Gee, lady,” he said, as we whisked out of his shop, “I wish every lady was as quick as you.”
Smiling to ourselves, we reentered the car. There was a charm that hung about us then, and we were not insensible of it, even aware that it had more to do with our situation than ourselves. We were still guests in the adult world of “lady” and “gentleman”; lightly we rode anchor in their harbor, partook of its perquisites, and escaped again to our enviable truancy. The rest of the world—we saw it in their faces—would be like us if it could. On the way through Hawthornton, I looked for a florist shop, but we passed too quickly by.
Five miles through the woodland of the Hawthorns’ private road brought us to the house. There had been no others along the way. But the house that loomed before us, in a cleared area rather bleak and shrubless after the woods behind us, had no baronial mystery about it. By the lights under its porte-cochere, it looked to be about forty years old—one of those rambling, tasteless houses, half timbered, with thick stone porches, which “comfortably off” people built around the turn of the century, more for summer use, but providently made habitable for all year round. As we came to a stop under the porte-cochere, and the coupe’s engine died, I heard the rushing sound of water, and saw that we seemed to be on the tip of a promontory that ended several hundred feet beyond.
“We on a lake?”
“Only the Atlantic,” said Luke. “Don’t you ever know where you are? We’ve been driving toward it all afternoon.”
“Hardly ever,” I said. “But we seem to be fated to meet Mrs. H. on one ocean or another.”
A capped maid opened the door. Mrs. Hawthorn stood at the foot of the stairs to greet us. It was the first time I had seen her in black, a very low-cut, smart black, enlivened only by the cuff of bracelets on her right arm. It made her seem less of a “character,” placing her almost in my mother’s generation, although she may not have been quite that, and a little unsettling me. In my world, the different generations did not much visit each other, at least did not seek each other’s company as she had ours.
She made a breezy stir of our welcome, giving us each a hand, directing the houseman as to our bags, referring us to separate corners for a wash. “Drinks in the dining room. See you there.”
When we entered, she was seated at the long dining table, alone. Three places were set, not at the head, but down toward the middle, ours opposite hers. There was no evidence that anyone else was to dine, or had.
I remember nothing of the room, except my surprise. As we clicked glasses, were served, I tried to recall her voice as it had come over the wire to New York; certainly her airy chitchat had given me the impression that we were to be members of a house party. Otherwise, considering the gap between us of situation, money, age—how odd it was of her to have singled us out! Her conversation seemed to be newly flecked with slang, a kind of slang she perhaps thought we used. “That way for the johns,” she had said, directing us to the bathrooms, and now, speaking of Bermuda, she asked us if we had not thought it “simply terrif.” She had found European travel “rather a frost.”
“I get more of a boot out of cutting a dash at home,” she said, grinning.
A second manservant and maid were serving us. “I keep the estate staffed the way it’s always been,” she said. “Even though a good bit of the time it’s only just me. Of course we’ve had to draw in our horns in lots of ways, like everyone else. But I’ve washed enough dishes in Hawthornton, I always say.” She smiled down at her bracelets.
“Have you always lived in Hawthornton?” said Luke.
She nodded. “The Senator’s people have always had the mills here. The Hawthorn Knitting Mills. And my father was the town parson—also the town drunk. But I married the mill-owner’s son.” She chuckled, and we had to laugh with her, at the picture she drew for us. It was the same with all her allusions to her possessions—allusions which were frequent and childlike. As they ballooned into boasting, she pricked them, careful to show that she claimed no kind of eminence because of them. What she did claim was the puzzling thing, for I felt that “the estate” meant something to her beyond the ordinary, and that her choice of our company was somehow connected with that meaning. Certainly she was shrewd enough to see that our scale of living was not hers, although for a while I dallied with the idea that a real social ignorance—that of the daughter of the down-at-the-heel parson, suddenly transmuted into the millowner’s wife—had kept her insensitive to all the economic gradations between, had made her assume that because we were “college people,” had been on the Bermuda boat, and had an anonymous East Side address, our jobs and our battered Chevy were only our way of drawing in our horns. But she did not seem to be really interested in who we were, or what our parents had been. Something about what we had, or were now, had drawn her to us; in her queer little overtures of slang she seemed to be wistfully ranging herself on our side. But I did not know what she imagined “our side” to be.
We took our coffee in what she referred to as “the big room”—at first it was hard to categorize as anything else. Large as a hotel lounge, it had something of the same imperviousness to personality. Sofas and club chairs, stodgy but solid, filled its middle spaces; there was a grand piano at either end, and all along the edges, beneath the irregularly nooked windows, there were many worn wicker-and-chintz settees. But, looking further, I saw the dark bookshelves filled with Elbert Hubbard editions, the burnt-leather cushions, of the kind that last a lifetime, scattering the wicker, the ponderous floor lamps, whose parchment umbrella shades were bound with fringe—and I began to recognize the room for what it was. This was a room from which the stags’ heads, the Tiffany glass had been cleared, perhaps, but it was still that room which lurked in albums and memoirs, behind pictures labeled The Family at—Summer of 1910. Bottom row my son Ned, later to fall in the Ardennes, daughters Julie and Christine, and their school friend, Mary X, now wife of my son George.
“I never did much to this room except put in the pianos,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “It’s practically the same as when we got married, the year Harry’s mother died, and he came back from France. We had some helluva parties here, though. Wonderful!” And now, as I followed her glance, I fancied that I detected in the room a faint, raffish overglaze of the early twenties, when I was too young to go to parties—here and there a hassock, still loudly black-and-white, a few of those ballerina book ends everyone used to have, and yes, there, hung in a corner, a couple of old batiks. Dozens of people could have sprawled here, the young men with their bell bottomed trousers, the girls with their Tutankhamen eardrops, pointed pumps, and orange-ice-colored silk knees. The weathered wicker would have absorbed the spilled drinks without comment, and cigarette burns would have been hilariously added to the burnt-leather cushions. Yes, it could have been a hell of a room for a party.
Mrs. Hawthorn led us to the windows and pointed out into the dark, staring through it with the sure, commanding eye of the householder. “You can’t see, of course, but we’re on three bodies of water here—the river, the Sound, and the ocean. There’s the end of the dock—the Coast Guard still ties up there once in a while, although we don’t keep it up any more. When I was a kid, it used to be fitted out like a summer hotel. I used to swim around the point and watch them.” Then, I thought, she would not have been one of the three little girls in the bottom row of the picture—she would never have been in that picture at all.
She closed the curtain. “Let me show you your room, then we’ll be off.” She led us upstairs, into a comfortable, nondescript bedroom. “That’s my door, across the hall. Knock when you’re ready.”
“Oh, it won’t take a minute to change,” I said.
“Change? Dear, you don’t have to change.”
“Oh, but we’ve brought our evening things,” I said. “It’ll only take us a minute.” There was a slight wail to my voice.
“Really it won’t,” said Luke. “We’re awfully sorry if we’ve delayed you, but we’ll rush.”
We continued our protests for a minute, standing there in the hall. She leaned down and patted my shoulder, looking at me with that musing smile older women wore when they leaned over baby carriages. I had encountered that look often that year, among my mother’s friends. “No, run along, and never mind,” she said. “Nobody else is going to be there.”
In front of the mirror in our room, I ran a comb through my curls. “Nobody who is anybody, I suppose she meant. I can’t imagine why else she picked on us. And when I think of those awful shoes!”
“You can wear them at home,” said Luke. “I like women to be flashy around the house. Come on, you look wonderful.”
“I’m going to change to them anyway. They’ll dance better.”
“You’ll only have to dance half the dances.”
“Luke—” I slid my feet into the shoes and twisted to check my stocking seams. “Do you suppose that little man, Dave, will be there? Do you suppose we’re being used as a sort of cover?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. Come on.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny she doesn’t say where the Senator is? At least make his excuses or something?”
“Away on business, probably.”
“Well, why isn’t she in Washington with him, then? I would be—if it were you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “But how come you got through college? There’s no Connecticut senator to Washington named Hawthorn.”
“Luke! I knew there was something fishy! Maybe there isn’t any Senator. Or maybe he’s divorced her, and nobody around here will know her. Or maybe she’s a little off, from his being dead, and wants to go on pretending he’s alive. With people like us—who wouldn’t know.”
He put back his head in laughter. “Now I know how you did get through college.” He kissed the back of my neck, and pushed me through the door. “State senator, dope,” he whispered, as we knocked at Mrs. Hawthorn’s.
“Ready?” She opened the door and held it back in such a way that we knew we were to look in. “This is the only room I changed,” she said. “I had it done again last year, the same way. I thought the man from Sloane would drop in his tracks when I insisted on the same thing. All that pink. Ninety yards of it in the curtains alone.” She laughed, as she had done at the child in Bermuda. “Of course I had no idea back then…I thought it was lovely, so help me. And now I’m used to it.”
We looked around. All that pink, as she had said. The room, from its shape, must be directly above the big room below; its great windows jutted out like a huge pink prow, overlooking the three bodies of water. Chairs with the sickly sheen of hard candy pursed their Louis Quatorze legs on a rose madder rug, under lamps the tinge of old powder puffs. There were a few glossy prints on the walls—nymphs couched like bonbons in ambiguous verdure. Marble putti held back the curtains, and each morning, between ninety yards of rosy lingerie, there would rise the craggy, seamed face of the sea.
Mrs. Hawthorn put her hand on one of the cherubs, and looked out. “We sailed from there on our honeymoon,” she said. “On the old Hawthorns’ yacht, right from the end of the dock. I remember thinking it would give, there were so many people on the end of it.” She took a fur from a chair, slung it around her shoulders, and walked to the door. At the door, she turned back and surveyed the room. “Ain’t it orful!” she said, in her normal voice. “Harry can’t bear it.”
She had two voices, I thought, as we followed her downstairs and got in the car she referred to as her runabout, that she’d made Harry give her in place of the chauffeur-driven Rolls. One voice for that tranced tale of first possession—when the house, the dock, the boudoir, Harry were new. And one for now—slangy, agnostic, amused.
She drove well, the way she swam, with a crisp, physical intensity. There had been bridle paths through these woods, she told us, but she hadn’t really minded giving up the horses; swimming was the only thing she liked to do alone. She swam every day; it kept her weight down to the same as when she married. “You’ll be having to pick yourself some exercise now too, honey,” she said, sighing. “And stick to it the rest of your days.”
We would turn on to the main road soon, I thought, probably to one of those roadhouses full of Saturday night daters such as Luke and I had been the year before, spinning out the evening on the cover charge and a couple of setups, and looking down our noses at the fat middle-agers who did not have to watch the tab, but were such a nuisance on the floor.
The car veered suddenly to the left, and reduced speed. Now we seemed to be riding on one of the overgrown paths. Twigs whipped through the open window and slurred out again as we passed. Beside me, Luke rolled up the window. We were all in the front seat together. No one spoke.
We stopped. We must be in the heart of the woods, I thought. There was nothing except the blind probe of the headlamps against leaves, the scraping of the November wind.
“Guess the switch from the house doesn’t work any more,” she said, half to herself. She took a flashlight from the compartment. “Wait here,” she said, and got out of the car. After she had gone, I opened the window and leaned across Luke, holding on to his hand. Above me, the stars were enlarged by the pure air. Off somewhere to the right, the flashlight made a weak, disappearing nimbus.
Then, suddenly, the woods were en fête. Festoons of lights spattered from tree to tree. Ahead of us, necromanced from the dark wood, the pattern of a house sprang on the air. After a moment our slow eyes saw that strings of lights garlanded its low log-cabin eaves, and twined up the two thick thrusts of chimney at either end. The flashlight wigwagged to us. We got out of the car, and walked toward it. Mrs. Hawthorn was leaning against one of the illuminated trees, looking up at the house. The furs slung back from her shoulders in a conqueror’s arc. As we approached, she shook her head, in a swimmer’s shake. “Well, ladies and gents,” she said, in the cool, the vinaigrette voice, “here it is.”
“Is it—is this the night club?” I said.
“This is it, baby,” she said, and the way she said it made me feel as if she had reached down and ruffled my curls. Instead, she reached up, and pressed a fuse box attached to the tree. For a minute, the red dazzle of the sign on the roof of the house made us blink. GINGER AND HARRY’S it said. There were one or two gaps in GINGER, and the second R of HARRY’S was gone, but the AND was perfect.
“Woods are death on electric lines,” she said. Leading the way up the flagged path to the door, she bent down, muttering, and twitched at the weeds that had pushed up between the flags.
She unlocked the door. “We no longer heat it, of course. The pipes are drained. But I had them build fires this afternoon.”
It was cold in the vestibule, just as it often was in the boxlike entrances of the roadhouses we knew, and, with its bare wood and plaster, it was just like them too—as if the flash and jump were reserved for the sure customers inside. To our right was the hat-check stall, with its brass tags hung on hooks, and a white dish for quarters and dimes.
“I never had any servants around here,” said Mrs. Hawthorn. “The girls used to take turns in the cloakroom, and the men used to tumble over themselves for a chance to tend bar, or be bouncer. Lord, it was fun. We had a kid from Hollywood here one night, one of the Wampas stars, and we sneaked her in as ladies’ matron, before anyone knew who she was. What a stampede there was, when the boys found out!”
I bent down to decipher a tiled plaque in the plaster, with three initials and a date—1918. Mrs. Hawthorn saw me looking at it.
“As my mother used to say,” she said. “Never have your picture taken in a hat.”
Inside, she showed us the lounges for the men and the women—the men’s in red leather, hunting prints, and green baize. In the powder room, done in magenta and blue, with girandoles and ball fringe, with poufs and mirrored dressing tables, someone had hit even more precisely the exact note of the smart public retiring room—every woman a Pompadour, for ten minutes between dances.
“I did this all myself,” she said. “From top to bottom. Harry had a bad leg when he came back—he was in an army hospital before we got married. He gave me my wedding present ahead of time—enough to remodel the old place, or build a new one. I surprised him. I built this place instead.”
“Is his leg all right now?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“His leg. Is it all right now?”
“Yes, of course. That was donkey’s years ago.” She was vague, as if about a different person. Behind her, Luke shook his head at me.
“And now…” she said. “Now…come in where it’s warm.” And this time my ear picked up that tone of hers as it might a motif—that deep, rubato tone of possession fired by memory. She opened the door for us, but for a scant moment before, with her hand on the knob, she approached it as a curator might pause before his Cellini, or a hostess before the lion of her afternoon.
And here it was. The two fires burned at either end; the sultry hooded sidelights reflected here and there on the pale, unscarred dance floor. The little round tables were neatly stacked at its edge, all but one table that was set for service, as if now that it was 3 A.M. or four, the fat proprietor and his headwaiter might just be sitting down for their morning bowl of soup. On the wall, behind the tables, flickered the eternal mural, elongated bal-masqué figures and vaudeville backdrops, painted dim even when new, and never meant to be really seen. It could be the one of the harlequin-faced young men with top hats and canes, doing a soft-shoe routine against an after-dark sky. Or it might be the one of the tapering Venuses with the not-quite bodies, behind prussian-blue intimations of Versailles. It did not matter. Here was the “Inn,” the “Club,” the “Spot,” the Glen Island, where one danced to Ozzie Nelson, the Log Cabin at Armonk, the one near Rumson, with the hot guitarist, the innumerable ones where, for an evening or a week of evenings, Vincent Lopez’s teeth glinted like piano keys under his mustache. The names would have varied somewhat from these names of the thirties, but here it was, with the orchestra shell waiting—the podium a little toward one end, so that the leader might ride sidesaddle, his suave cheek for the tables, his talented wrist for the band. Only the air was different, pure and still, without the hot, confectionery smell of the crowd. And the twin fires, though they were burning true and red, had fallen in a little, fallen back before the chill advance of the woods.
So, for the second time, we sat down to champagne with Mrs. Hawthorn. There was a big phonograph hidden in a corner; after a while she set it going, and we danced, Luke first with her, then with me. And now, as the champagne went to our heads, it was not the logs, or the chair arms that moved, but we who moved, looping and twirling to the succulent long-phrased music, laughing and excited with the extraordinary freedom of the floor. I thought of Dave, the little man, but Mrs. Hawthorn never mentioned his name. She was warm, gay—“like a young girl”—as I had heard it said now and then of an older woman. I had thought that this could not be so without grotesquerie, but now, with the wisdom of the wine, I imagined that it could—if it came from inside. She had the sudden, firm bloom of those people who really expand only in their own homes. For the first time, we were seeing her there.
Toward the evening’s height, she brought out some old jazz records, made specially for her, with the drum and cymbal parts left out, and from the wings back of the podium she drew out the traps, the cymbals, and the snare. In the old days, she told us, everybody who came did a turn. The turn with the drums had been hers. We made her play some of the songs for us, songs I remembered, or thought I remembered, from childhood, things like Dardanella and Jadda Jadda Jing Jing Jing. She had some almost new ones too—Melancholy Baby, and Those Little White Lies. We gave her a big hand.
Then, just as we began to speak of tiring, of going to bed because we had to drive back early the next day, she let the drumsticks fall, and put her fingers to her mouth. “Why, I forgot it!” she said. “I almost forgot to show you the best thing of all!” She reached up with the other hand, and turned off the big spotlight over the orchestra shell.
Once more, only the sidelights glowed, behind their tinted shades. Then the center ceiling light began to move. I hadn’t noticed it before; it was so much like what one expected of these places. That was the point—that it was. It was one of those fixtures made of several tiers of stained glass, with concealed slots of lights focused in some way, so that as it revolved, and the dancers revolved under it, bubbles of color would slide over their faces, run in chromatic patches over the tables, and dot the far corners of the room.
“Dance under it,” she said. “I’ll play for you.” Obediently, we put our arms around one another, and danced. She played Good Night, Ladies. The drums hardly sounded at all. When it was over, she let the sticks rest in her lap. The chandelier turned, silently. Oval blobs of light passed over her face, greening it and flushing it like long, colored tears. Between the lights, I imagined that she was looking at us, as if she knew something about us that we ourselves did not know. “It was lovely,” she said. “That first year.” And this time I could not have said which of her two voices she had used.
We left early the next morning. By prearrangement, she was to sleep late and not bother about us, and in a sense we did not see her again. But, as we drove down the private road, we stopped for a moment at a gap in the trees, to see the sun shining, great, over the sea. There was a tall, gray matchstick figure on the end of the dock. As we watched, it dove. She could not have seen us; probably she would not have wanted to. She was doing the exercise to keep her weight down, perhaps, or swimming around the dock, as she had done as a child. Or perhaps she was doing the only thing she cared to do alone. It was certainly she. For as the figure came up, we saw its arm—the one mailed arm, flashing in the sun.
During the next few years I often used to tell the story of our visit to Hawthornton. So many casual topics brought it up so naturally—Bermuda, the people one meets when one travels, the magnified eccentricities of the rich. When it became fashionable to see the twenties as the great arterial spurt of the century’s youth, I even told it that way, making her seem a symbol, a denizen of that time. I no longer speculated on why she had invited us; I never made that the point of the story. But for some time now I have known why, and now that I do, I know how to tell her story at last. For now that I know why, it is no longer Mrs. Hawthorn’s story. It is ours.
It is almost eighteen years since we were at Mrs. Hawthorn’s, just as it was then almost eighteen years since Harry had come back from France. I was never to meet anyone who knew them, nor was I ever to see her again. But I know now that there was never any special mystery about her and Harry. Only the ordinary mystery of the distance that seeps between people, even while they live and lie together as close as knives.
Luke is in the garden now. His face passes the window, intent on raking the leaves. Yet he is as far from me now as ever Harry was from Hawthornton, wherever Harry was that day. He and I are not rich; we do not have the externalizations of the rich. Yet, silently, silently, we too have drawn in our horns.
So, sometimes, when I walk in the woods near our house, it is to a night club that I walk. I sit down on a patch of moss, and I am sitting at the little round table on the unscarred floor. I fold my hands. Above me, the glass dome turns. I watch them—the two people, about whom I know something they themselves do not know. This is what I see:
It is a long, umber autumn afternoon. To the left the sun drops slowly, a red disc without penumbra. Along the country roads, the pines and firs are black-green, with the somber deadness of a tyro’s painting of Italy. Lights pop up in the soiled gray backs of towns. Inside the chugging little car the heater warms them; they are each with the one necessary person; they have made love the night before. The rest of the world, if it could, would be like them.