JUST AS BELLE THOUGHT, Mark Dudley had lied when he told her she was the first person he’d spoken to. By the time he appeared at her door that day he had already tracked down several people who knew them when they lived in the Village, a man who had worked with her at the WPA, a nurse who took care of Clay in the mental hospital he’d been in right before he met Belle. There were also two old men who knew her at the Academy of Design, and a suburban grandmother who was in the one class Clay took at the Art Students League. Mark Dudley has recorded all those people, their ramblings and reminiscences, filled for the most part with irrelevancies (“She chewed a lot of gum, I remember that much”; “He never spoke a word to me the whole term”) and had the tapes transcribed by a secretarial service. Meanwhile, the assistant his researcher has found in Montana is hunting up people who knew Clay’s family when he was a child. As soon as her list is complete, he will fly out there.
He has also located Belle’s sister, in Brooklyn, which none of his predecessors ever did, and entered her address and phone number on his computer; before approaching her, though, he needs to see how things will develop with Belle. For the same reason, he hasn’t yet tried to talk to any of the people who knew them out on the Island; he’s not about to blow his chances with her for the sake of a handyman’s evidence.
But his greatest coup has been Sophie Horowitz, Belle’s best friend in her Village days. “It was like we were in love, I mean it. It was a real schoolgirl romance we had going, only we were twenty-three.” The two women have not spoken in almost forty years. “Because of him, of course. Because I couldn’t stand the way he treated her, it made me sick, and I told her so.” She looked at him defiantly, a tiny bent woman in a wheelchair who seemed for a moment, from the very force of her vehemence, to be rising, or swelling, out of it.
“It wasn’t love, it was thrall. Thrall. Like in the fairy tales. And she’d always been the one to tell the rest of us not to do that, to get on with our own painting and not throw everything away for some man. She was so fierce back then, I wish you could have known her. But he was a genius, she said, that made it different, only it came down to the same thing. You wouldn’t believe how women were in those days; you can’t even imagine it. Our parents came to America to give us a better life, and the boys had a better life, but the girls, they had the same life as always. She had her mother’s life, that she hated; her mother was married to a great man, a big person, she was just the servant, and that’s what she did too. It’s almost funny. A good course in Freud might have saved her, only she didn’t believe in Freud, she believed in art. Don’t get me started on that one.”
But of course getting her started was exactly what he was there to do. That first day, however, she would not talk any more about Belle, no matter how he tried to lead her. She talked about politics instead, about the decline of the left, starting with the 60s rebels and their childish antics, the ongoing cowardice of the Democrats. The second time, too, she dangled her knowledge in his face and then pulled back, understanding full well that once she had told him all she knew he might never come back. He is used to such interviews, to talking to lonely old people with secrets to be meted out. It is part of his job, which he is good at.
Already he has visited her three times in the nursing home in Ardsley, a converted millionaire’s mansion where she spends her days sitting in her wheelchair on the white veranda, dressed in a hot pink track suit. All the others, too, strapped into their chairs, slumped over and staring into space, are dressed for jogging, but unlike them, she does not mutter or moan to herself. She seems to be the only inmate with her mental faculties intact. “Landscape,” she says, gesturing at the golf course a hundred yards away, where a weeping willow stirs in the breeze. “Sometimes it’s a Ruysdael, sometimes it’s a Constable, sometimes it’s just a Hopper. More and more it’s a Hopper. I’m losing my sense of splendor. Don’t ever get old, Mr. Dudley.”
“I wish you’d call me Mark.”
“Mark, then. Have you been to see her yet?”
“Not yet.”
“They say she’s got terrible arthritis — she used to be a wonderful dancer, did you know that? She’d go to all the dances and drag some man out onto the floor just so she could show off. I used to love to watch her. Of course he didn’t dance at all; she must have given it up when she met him. Along with everything else.”
“Was that what your fight was about?”
“We had lots of fights. I yelled at her, I pleaded with her, I did everything but get down on my knees. She used to write him these letters — you know the kind, the ones women write to men who are making them miserable. They were living together, but she’d write him these letters and leave them for him on the kitchen table. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ stuff like that. Analyzing his problems, and her problems, and their problems. Sometimes she’d bring them over to my place and read them to me. They could break your heart, those letters, they were so reasonable, she was trying so hard to understand, to sort everything out. And then he’d read them and say, ‘You’re right,’ only nothing changed.”
“So you advised her to stop writing letters?”
“Why should I do that? That wasn’t the point, the letters. The point was she should have left him. She used to keep a journal, too, where she’d write it all down, everything that was going on, in these little notebooks like the schoolchildren used. Maybe it helped her. She wasn’t painting much in those days. And then one day he found one, and I guess he threw some kind of almighty shit fit. After that she’d hide them at my place. She made me promise not to read them, either.”
“And did you?”
“I wouldn’t do that behind her back. Not then. She made me put them in a special place so that Howard wouldn’t find them — my husband, only he wasn’t my husband then. Howard Aronow. The poet. I’d put them in my underwear drawer and places like that. These little black notebooks with speckles on the front.”
“What did your husband think of Clay Madden?”
“He hardly ever saw him. Howard was in Washington during the war, working for the Writers’ Project in some mansion down there, and it was during the war that she and I stopped being friends. Or no — right after the war. Peace had been declared; and then we had our last fight. The really big one.”
“But you’d had the same fight before?”
“Not quite like that.”
“What was different about it?”
“It was about the Jews. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance still happen to have any of those notebooks, would you?”
“I might. So what do you think about our elections? You think the goddamn Republicans are going to pull it off?”
Sophie was being difficult again, was watching her in that accusatory way, passing judgment, or rather confirming the various judgments she had already passed. For months now it had been going on like that. She hardly even seemed to talk any more; she merely watched and waited, until it was time to pounce. And Belle, who had always been more completely herself with Sophie than with anyone else, kept jabbering on evasively about things she no longer even thought about: her job at the WPA, for example, which had been cut back to half-time, and her boss, who was driving her mad, she said, which wasn’t remotely true, because she forgot his existence the minute she stepped outside.
This time she found herself trying to entertain Sophie with stories about her piecework, as she called it, which consisted of painting horses on ties. The man who paid her had been complaining lately about the quality of her tails: “You haven’t captured the poetry for me,” he said. But Sophie was not amused. Her face was a pantomime of reproach; she fidgeted in her chair, quivering with the need to get it out.
“Why doesn’t he paint the horses?” she asked, meaning Clay. “Then you’d have some time for your painting.”
“Did you just want to see me so you could do this?”
“Do what?”
“What you’re doing now.”
“I’m worried about you, that’s all.”
“Well, don’t be.”
“You haven’t even mentioned the war. I bet you never give it a thought.” Sophie bit her lip. “You’re like someone pushing a piano up a flight of stairs.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. Just an image that came to me. You’ll never admit you’re in trouble.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sophie.”
“You’re in a bad way, you know that? Like someone under a spell.”
“Can’t you let up for five minutes?”
For a second they glared at each other. Then Sophie ducked her head and traced a figure eight on the marble tabletop. “So Madame Dreyfus is going to give him a show uptown. That’s great.”
“It is, sort of.”
“What about your painting? What’s happening with that?”
Belle set down her cup. “Could you not start on that one?”
“You’re burying yourself alive for him.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course you are. And you’re the one who used to yell about that louder than anyone.”
“It’s not personal. It has nothing to do with the personal. It’s about something else.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It isn’t. You saw his paintings. You know how good they are.”
“I don’t know. I thought some of your stuff last year was pretty good.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Not like that.”
“So you’ve dedicated yourself to his genius.”
“I am not some poor girlie fresh out of art school. I know what I’m doing. What time is it?”
“Ten past six.”
“I’ve got to go.” She stood up. “Our presence is required at Rosie’s tonight, and I have to iron my black dress. Are you going to give me flak about that too?”
“You’re just angry because you know I’m right. Because I want you to be a serious person.” Sophie sighed, a yenta’s sigh, full of ostentatious patience. “Forget it. I’ll walk you to the corner.”
They both dropped some coins on the table and gathered up their things. “I don’t know,” Belle said. “Who the hell knows what’s going on?” They both knew it was a kind of peace-offering, however lame; she was saying she did not want Sophie to give up on her yet.
They were almost to the corner where they would part when Sophie spoke again. “So is she really as crazy as they say?”
“Who?”
“You know. La Dreyfus.”
Belle slowed down, considering. “Sometimes I think she’s no crazier than the rest of us, she just never had to learn to control herself. So it’s all right out there, the stuff that everyone else hides.”
“But you spend time with her, you go to her parties. Do you like her?”
“Once in a while I feel sorry for her. Nobody could like her.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Why?”
“Because, honeleh, you start liking people like Rosie Dreyfus, you’re really done for. Geendicht. There’s only so much money a person can have in this world and not turn evil. She’s got a lot more than that.”