Anne Gringold’s Memoir
“He is the greatest writer of his time,” Dorinda said, in that tone children use when quoting established parental opinion. “Perhaps,” she added, “of any time. And he is a relation of ours.”
“By marriage,” I pointed out. This was not particularly generous of me. Dorinda had been so endowed by life with all the elements of charm and wealth that her claim to the greatest writer seemed, at the least, to be gilding the lily. (This last was a phrase of my mother’s whose meaning I had discerned through use rather than analysis of its metaphor or knowledge of its source.)
“His grandchild is certainly our relation,” Dorinda said, closing, as was her invariable habit, the discussion. Since the great writer’s son had married Dorinda’s father’s sister, no argument was possible. An only child like me, she now had a cousin her age with a romantic and war-torn past, due to appear out of the blue (of the ocean, not the sky) and add to Dorinda’s life more romance, a commodity of which, in my opinion, she already had an unfair share. The only overwhelming disappointment, which loyalty to my sex forbade my pointing out even though it might have punctured a little Dorinda’s boasts, was that the grandchild was a girl. A boy, in this case as, I was certain, in all cases, was what had been longed for. Still, this girl bore the magic name and might even, like Margaret Mead, a hero of mine, decline to change it upon marriage or, even more daringly, decline to marry. At that point, the car drove up, the chauffeur honked and we rushed out to be driven to the beach club and our ocean games.
This memory, from the time just before America entered into World War II, returns to me like a flashback from the sort of movie they used to make when I was young. Except that those flashbacks were extended, and full of portent. My memories, which have seized me more often and more unexpectedly in recent years, are like a photograph flashed on the wall. I was an ardent photographer in those young days and for many years thereafter. I had an excellent camera, thanks again to Dorinda and her family, and Dorinda had taught me how to flash pictures, not yet in color, on the wall through a large projector. I see us, therefore, sitting on the huge porch of her summer home on the Jersey shore, swinging our rockers violently backward, awaiting our ride to the beach. The conversation is not in the picture, not even (in my memory) in balloons above our heads, as though we were cartoon figures. Rather, the language is the scene; is what the scene evokes, is that remembered moment. A movie from a later time, called Hiroshima, Mon Amour, was, in my opinion, the last to capture memory properly. Movies today are all crosscuts and violent effects, screams, movements. Memories (as opposed to traumas, or repressed scenes) are still; only the words speak. But, in my experience at least, they are always insignificant memories that have remained for no discernible reason, ready to be evoked by a chance occurrence or remark. (Once, when Dorinda and I were in the car with her parents, the chauffeur driving, Dorinda and I on the jump seats, a fly buzzed about us in the summer heat. “And I thought,” Dorinda told me later, “that I would never remember that fly and, of course having said that, will always remember it.” I never thought to ask her when we met again, both well into middle age, if she had remembered it. But I remembered for her, after all.)
The year when Dorinda’s cousin arrived was 1941. We would all three be together at the end of that year, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. I remember that we were in Dorinda’s room, and her mother, who had been listening to the Philharmonic concert on the radio, came in to tell us the concert had been interrupted with the news. Every adult I knew at that time, if home on Sunday, listened to the Philharmonic: my mother, my aunts, the parents of my and Dorinda’s schoolmates. Such concerts seemed to me oddly appropriate as the channel for the news that we were at war. Dorinda, her cousin Nellie, and I settled into the life of wartime America. We all rejoiced that Nellie had been plucked from the disaster that was Europe. I knew of others similarly plucked, who turned up as guests in the elegant homes where my mother worked. But they were different, part of my secret life with my mother, resented, overtly scorned and snubbed.
“Why do they criticize everything here,” I asked my mother. “Why aren’t they grateful? Why do they always talk about how much better everything was in Germany? If it was so much better, why didn’t they stay there?”
I did not then know mine was a widespread and stupid question; what immigrant or refugee does not think of home? I suspect I hated them because they were Jews and allowed me the regrettable comfort a poor child might find in Jew-hating. It was altogether a different matter for Dorinda, whose family, an integral part of what came to be known as “Our Crowd,” were friends with Guggenheims and Warburgs, to be Jewish. They were as elegant as Episcopalians and almost indistinguishable. Besides, Dorinda’s mother was a gentile who used to take us to midnight mass at her Lutheran church. I forgave myself my anti-Semitism by the ridiculous canard that some of my best friends were Jews. My mother supported me in this neat and, as it turned out, universal dismissal of the Jewish question. She said that nobody bothered honorable people; I suppose she meant rich. Years later, when I read a book by Paule Marshall called Brown Girl, Brownstones in which she talks of her mother’s cleaning “Jew floors,” I felt ashamed, and with less excuse than Paule Marshall had. She was black, and had not known Dorinda and her family.
The greatest writer of his time was named Foxx; Emmanuel Foxx. I did not remember having heard of him when Dorinda broke the news of his granddaughter’s coming, but my mother had a first edition of his most famous novel among her books when she died, and she had written in it the date of its acquisition; she must at least have mentioned him to me at an earlier time. I suspect that, as with many declared masterpieces, his novel was ardently read by scholars and skimmed or ignored by those intelligent ones, few enough in every country, who, uninstructed, read books constantly and eagerly. Unlike Virginia Woolf, but like James Joyce or Marcel Proust, he was more an academic’s than a reader’s passion. Perhaps he was nearer to Proust than Joyce. Certainly he stood, as I now understand, together with these two and T. S. Eliot, at the center of modernism as it was conceived in academic departments and learned books and articles. Unlike Joyce or Proust, however, his central character was a woman. With an intensity, attention to detail, and experimentation with language that was dumbfounding in its originality and inventiveness, Foxx had written a year in the life of a woman that followed, with dogged persistence and great ingenuity, her every thought and passion. She was a woman seen through the eyes of a man looking through her eyes, and she set the scholars many a profound challenge.
All of this, of course, I learned later. In 1941, awaiting Nellie Foxx’s arrival, I knew only that her grandfather had written an impressive and in some ways obscene book whose publication had been won by the efforts of the enlightened—including Dorinda’s father—against the benighted, the protectors of public morals. Foxx’s female hero masturbated, menstruated, fantasized, but was forever distinguished from Joyce’s Molly Bloom by her high intelligence, her allegiance to her women friends, her ambivalence toward men, whom she admired, emulated, and despised, and her sexual attraction to women. It was a scene of lesbian lovemaking that had got the book banned, although in 1941 Dorinda and I did not know that, Dorinda claiming to be an expert only in heterosexual cavortings. Young people today find it hard to believe, but we did not even know the word lesbian, nor the possibility of such activity. Like Queen Victoria, we thought only men had the equipment or the nerve for sexual experimentation; we had of course heard of male homosexuals and referred to them, sneeringly, as “fairies” or “thataway.” We were the children of our time.
What I chiefly recall (as opposed to having flashed before me as a memory) is the amazing generosity of Dorinda and her family. Dorinda had adopted me as bosom friend, and her parents allowed me to be her almost constant companion. For example, when Dorinda was given something, I was given something too. As with cameras: in order to help out some German refugees, Dorinda’s father bought cameras from them, Leica M3s, and he gave the best one to Dorinda, and another, for some reason inferior, to me. We became photographers, good photographers, and even years later, when single-lens reflex cameras were almost universal, I stuck to my old Leica with its range finder and its heavy metal case. I have it yet, and when I take it for some repair, I am told it will fetch a handsome price if I ever decide to sell it and join the contemporary camera world. I keep it, not from sentiment, but from admiration. It is, in my opinion, the best camera ever made.
But it was not alone in such generous gifts that the Goddards expressed themselves. They made me part of their family, without ever making me feel like a poor relation. The maid who picked up and washed Dorinda’s dirty clothes would seek mine in my suitcase where I had hoped to conceal them: in a short time they were returned to me, cleaned and ironed. The maids never treated me in any way as an inferior, and I know: now that Dorinda’s mother must have assured this by giving them extra money and talking to them. My mother spoke sometimes of whether or not I ought to tip the maids as a guest in the house, but nothing ever came of this. We decided that a child would not have been expected to hand money to a servant.
I feared horribly that the arrival of Nellie would signal my expulsion from this paradise. Nellie would become the substitute companion, and I would gradually be dropped. My mother had been troubled by my friendship with people as rich and elevated as Dorinda’s family, and now, with Nellie’s coming, she warned me I would suffer what she had always feared: the betrayal of my trust and the discomfort of my return to the life she was able to offer me, a life not only ordinary but tense and threatened.
The miracle is that this never happened, that we continued as three, that Dorinda never, until many years later at least, felt anything but loyalty to us both. And since she had the money, and we did not, we all shared in it. Dorinda told us she was practicing socialism on a small scale; no doubt she was closer to what in later years would be called, with a sneer, a Lady Bountiful, but I can testify that her benevolence, involving no evident privileged class and no bureaucracy, seemed simply ideal.
My mother worked as a housekeeper in the various homes of the very rich. I had met Dorinda because my mother had been lent by a New Jersey neighbor to Dorinda’s mother during a summer week. In those days, the coast of New Jersey was known as the Jewish Newport; I have recently read in an autobiography by Peggy Guggenheim that she despised it: the huge houses, the many servants, the roses and hydrangeas which alone would grow in that climate. I came upon the Peggy Guggenheim book quite by accident not too long ago, and it brought back to me those heavenly summers; only to a Guggenheim could they have seemed tacky. To me, they were the good life, and whenever the good life was invoked, whether of Cole Porter on the Riviera or the Kennedys in Hyannis Port, the picture of that life, even in my mature and worldly mind, was New Jersey in the years before and during World War II.
I suppose I seemed a challenge to Dorinda when we met; we were twelve years old. My mother had got permission to bring me with her to Dorinda’s house; I was the perfect child of an upper servant—quiet, unobtrusive, observant, full of longing. But Dorinda, who was always looking for new adventures and new worlds to conquer, snapped me up, ordered me to accompany her to the beach club, to the tennis court, to the riding stables. She gave me her clothes, her enthusiasms, her aching affection. The only miracle in this was that, despite the suddenness of her attentions, and the remarkable generosity of her family when importuned with my needs and requirements as Dorinda saw them, despite even the arrival of the glamorously derived Nellie, Dorinda’s loyalty to me never faltered.
In time I came to see that my mother, schooled in a harsh world, was frustrated by this constancy. It belied the lessons she had determined to teach me, of the perfidy of friends, the danger of circumstances, the likelihood of disaster. And this lesson was reinforced and repeated, not only by my mother but by her four sisters, whose whole “take” on life was the prevention of disaster. Life was not to be lived, let alone experienced; it was to be outwitted.
Only three of the aunts actually imposed their views upon me; the other one had run off with someone else’s husband, and dared not show her face. Propriety was all. When, in college, I read George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, I saw in Maggie Tulliver’s aunts my own relations. But my mother, unlike Maggie’s, was not weak. She was the oldest and the strongest of them all. The sisters were part of what could, no doubt, be called a matriarchy; certainly they had been produced by their mother, a woman of extraordinary power and attraction. Their father, apart from his inevitable part in the fertilization of eggs—and certainly I would have suggested even in my youth that these women were the result of parthenogenesis had I known the word—played no part in the family drama. My grandmother had early discovered that he was competent at nothing but drinking and throwing money away and she left him to it, supporting the family and directing its passage through life.
The three ever-present sisters—and I thought of them more as my mother’s sisters than as my aunts, almost as though they were aspects of her, or a kind of chorus chanting again her pronouncements—were married, all of them to men who made good livings and were able to provide their wives with smart clothes, a good decorator, and vacations the need of which always mystified me, for they did nothing all year, having a maid and, when in due time they each produced two children, a “girl” who looked after them. That my mother was a kind of servant was a fact they were forced to overlook because she was so much the dominant figure in their lives that they could not operate without her. They lied about her work to their friends, recognizing perhaps that while they had “girls” to help out, in the world where my mother worked children had nannies (as Peggy Guggenheim wrote, often one for each child) and, later, governesses. Dorinda was at the governess stage when we met, and from that governess I, together with Dorinda, learned to speak and read French. Fortunately, I was less quick at this, as at everything, than Dorinda; perhaps that was why I was never a threat in that way.
In the years between the time when Dorinda and I met and the time when Nellie came, books were the chief source of our fantasies and the major topic of conversation. I remember with particular clarity when we read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, and both dreamed that a filmmaker would decide to make a movie of that novel and cast one of us as Portia, the adolescent heroine. Neither of us had any doubt that, should we be spotted by a movie director as stars so often had been, or so magazines such as Life told us at the time, Dorinda would be the one. She was slim and ethereal-looking with good bone structure of the Garbo sort and wide-set blue eyes. I was fuller of figure, although athletic, and anything but ethereal. But we were, in school and after, together so constantly, I was able to imagine that some of Dorinda’s qualities rubbed off on me.
Have I mentioned that Dorinda’s family, at her earnest request, had arranged for her school to grant me a scholarship? Perhaps they took me because I might add an interesting, lower-class note, perhaps because Dorinda’s family, having been generous in their donations, must be listened to, perhaps because the Head of the school, interviewing me, thought she spotted promise: I shall never know. But I transferred just before high school to Dorinda’s school, known as Miss Hadley’s, where we wore uniforms and did not, happily for me, compete about clothes. My mother used to say that the only competition seemed to be about who could be the sloppiest. I adored the school.
Of course we did not read anyone as contemporary as Elizabeth Bowen in class, but the library was encouraging about current fiction, so we were wonderfully up to date and yet, it occurs to me, read “good” books, well written, delicate, and sophisticated. If we missed much, we learned the sound, the precision, of proper English prose. How old-fashioned I, who have always been so radical, must sound.
I particularly recall Elizabeth Bowen because she had (I must have read this later) a profound sense of place. She said somewhere that place was more important to her than character; having become a storyteller myself, I recognize that place has never especially inspired me or moved me except as it can be evoked by a sudden, sharp memory. Descriptions of places always seemed to me tedious, and to this day I become impatient with authors who insist upon describing all the furnishings in a room before they will allow their characters to enter it or, once there, to speak. Yet I should describe the house on the New Jersey coast because it was, as a place, so central to our youth, and the years of our triumvirate.
The house and grounds occupied an entire block, the house at one end, the garage at the other, and enormous gardens and lawn between. In those days, the rich did not have swimming pools and tennis courts on their own property: they belonged to clubs for those purposes. Their homes were for relaxation. So, if there was to be a picnic under some trees on the lawn, a table would be set up, food brought out by the servants, and a cloth spread. The house itself was built for the summer: it had a porch on two sides, with rockers and swings. One entered the house always through the front door off the porch, into an enormous living room (as I thought of it), with a stair on one side sweeping upward to the bedroom floors; at the extreme top of the stairs was a skylight with stained glass; the living room was open to that skylight, which formed part of its ceiling. In the center of this room, in a comfortable chair, would sit Dorinda’s grandfather, the maker of the fortune. As any of Dorinda’s friends entered, he would greet them: “Hello, my dear!” and beckon them to him. Each of Dorinda’s friends answered that beckoning only once for he would grab his victim, sit her on his lap, and begin to stroke her, gradually moving his hand toward her private parts, and where her breasts were beginning. After the first time, each of us learned to greet him cordially, while circling at a safe distance around his chair toward the staircase, or the dining room off to the back, well out of his reach.
I have often reflected since that Dorinda never warned her friends about her grandfather, but confirmed their experience with a sort of “now you know” shrug. What her motives were in the matter, whether she thought we all ought to find out for ourselves as the quickest way to useful knowledge, or whether she disliked mentioning the antics of the dirty old man, I never asked and never learned. I can only say that the one experience with him was not bad enough to be called child abuse—we were, after all, in the open in the middle of a busy house—and it taught me something about sex that seemed, thereafter, essential: men took it from you if they could. I found this not frightening, but useful knowledge, of the sort I doggedly collected.
Dorinda had a suite of rooms to herself; her French governess had one room, often empty in the summer as she took her vacation to France and then, as the war came, elsewhere; there was a room for a guest. Dorinda’s own room, both here and in New York, was, at her request, fixed up as a sitting room. After Nellie came, she and I shared the twin beds in the guest room. In New York, Nellie had her own room, and I stayed overnight only occasionally. But my memories are, mainly, of the house on the Jersey shore.
In the evenings there, we neatened ourselves up for dinner, which was served in the large dining room with Grandpa at the head of the table. He used to interrupt the conversation with bursts of song and totally inappropriate observations, either to the conversation or the occasion, and at the end of every meal he would always struggle to his feet and make the same loud and tiresome remark about that meal being over. I always averted my eyes from this embarrassing, because unchanging, scene. But no one ever complained of his habits, or made him feel anything but the head of the household which, financially, he doubtless was. Dorinda’s father now headed the business his father had made so successful—it had been founded in the previous generation as a small enterprise—and it is somehow characteristic of the time that I never knew what the business was. I remember thinking that they made money, which was true, God knows. Recently I asked Dorinda what the business had been—the family was long out of it—and she said that they had been investment bankers of some sort, so I had been largely right after all.
As soon as we heard of Nellie’s arrival, we began to read the famous book by Emmanuel Foxx. He had written others, of course, before and after, but this was the one that had made him famous, the one they had to fight to get published in the United States and England. Dorinda and I had been too young at the time of the trial allowing the book’s publication to take notice. Dorinda heard all about it at home; her father was closely involved with the whole matter, and he was not a man to consider confidentiality a rational mode nor to temper his stories to the young. When Nellie was coming, therefore, Dorinda suddenly remembered the stories, and found a copy of the famous novel in the summer house: actually, the family had copies of all the first editions from many countries, and much of the conferencing at the time of the trial had taken place on the Jersey shore.
Because we were bookish, we had less trouble finding the salacious parts of the book than we might have had in 1941 at age fifteen. For the most part, the accounts of his heroine’s thoughts were, to us, endlessly boring as, I suspect, they were to many. But he provided the reader with moments of heightened prose describing sexual experiences; we read these with enormous delight. Alone, I might have pretended to be unimpressed, even not to understand, but Dorinda’s forthrightness made that impossible. So we smacked our lips, and thought of the delights that awaited us. They were nothing like the thoughts with which we had previously identified, of Elizabeth Bowen’s Portia.
In those days, days hard to recall after the sexual and other revolutions of our time, it was repeatedly and annoyingly said of girls that they were “sweet sixteen and never been kissed.” Dorinda and I snorted at this, although it partly described us: if not sweet, we had not “necked,” as we all called it. Life offered far too few opportunities. But by the time we were sixteen, we were the triumvirate; we had all been kissed, and the next summer at the Jersey shore, we went to the dances arranged by the USO to meet sailors. No sexual adventures came of these dances, but we liked to ask the boys to the house for dinner three at a time, an intrusion that Dorinda’s mother, as usual, took in her stride; there was always enough food. When we all were at dinner, Dorinda’s grandfather would catch sight of their white uniforms somewhere around the second course, and start singing a naval song from Gilbert and Sullivan. We girls giggled and smirked at the sailor boys’ discomfort. We felt like women of the world.
In the winters in New York my mother did not live “in,” but shared an apartment with me in the lower floor of a private house between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues in the Eighties. It was a largely Irish neighborhood then, and Irish girls would shout at me from the stoops because, as was instantly evident to them, I was different. The degree to which I accepted this as a fact of life, to be borne but not reacted to either externally or internally, came to astonish me in later years. Perhaps the sneers of the Irish children did not impress me because it did not touch my real life, lived with Dorinda and Nellie.
That winter, the winter before Pearl Harbor, we began to have parties with boys in Dorinda’s living room. Her parents willingly cleared out; her grandfather, who during the winters lived with his nurse in a hotel, had not to be considered. Not that we ever did consider him; he was like a domestic totem, bowed to, steered clear of, little noticed in the present demanding world of each day.
Where did the boys come from? I can scarcely remember. In Dorinda’s circle, they were a source simply tapped, from boys’ schools, her parents’ friends’ children, dancing classes; one of the boys—Len, the one with whom I early became paired off—had been picked up at a summer farm Dorinda had once visited, where he was working to save money for college. Did he and I immediately recognize each other as from a different class? He was to become my first, my sweetest, my only lover. When I was not yet sixteen, he and I half sat or lay on the couch or floor like the others, necking, kissing, to (can it have been always?) César Franck’s only symphony.
The music was played on a Capehart, an unbelievably elegant record player. Those of us who did not have to put one record at a time on our players (and the records then were 78 rpm; it took four or five recorded on both sides for a symphony) had at best a device that dropped them in turn one upon the other; these records had, of course, been manufactured so that all of them were stacked to play on one side, then the lot turned over to play on the other. But as the records piled up they slipped and scratched, causing most of us to abandon these recordings in favor of the old-style records which we turned over and changed by hand.
But the Capehart, which occupied a huge cabinet, had its own special mechanism. Mechanical hands emerged and turned the record. After the record had been played on both sides, the hands flung it to the other end of the cabinet where it landed on a felt-covered slide. Sometimes the Capehart became angry—at the music, at us, at being overworked?—and it would fling the records across the room. We laughed and applauded and stacked them up again. I always mean to ask Dorinda or her mother what finally became of the Capehart. When long-playing records came in, it doubtless went the way of all obsolescent objects in our culture.
Nellie was very popular at our school and with our group; and life between the three of us, Dorinda, Nellie, and I, seemed an unending conversation of discovery about life and plans for our, as we then believed, unconventional futures. What did we imagine our lives would be? I have tried to remember what we said to each other, tried to hear our voices separately rather than melded, as they are when I recall them, into a chorus. Well, perhaps I should say chorus with leader, for Dorinda’s was the dominating voice, the one who set our tone and orchestrated our debates. This was not only because her family and her money were supporting both Nellie and me; it was because we two were on the quiet side, and Dorinda was forthright: she knew what she wanted and what she meant to say. Neither Nellie nor I could ever have imagined, let alone prophesied, that Dorinda would revert to a conventional destiny. Not even Nellie’s experience of Europe seemed more authentic than Dorinda’s, since Dorinda had visited Europe, and had Europe visit her, all her life. And the only experience I could offer, of poverty and thrift, was not one I had any desire to emphasize.
What did we talk of all those hours? The imagined sex lives of our teachers, the actual lives of our classmates’ families, at least as we had observed and interpreted them.
“Her father’s had a mistress for years,” Dorinda would say; I remember that discussion of a particularly rich and elegant family whose sad last offspring was in our class.
“What is a mistress?” Nellie asked. I remember that I too did not know what the term meant (however unbelievable that seems these days), and was glad that Nellie had asked.
“It’s a concubine,” Dorinda said, giving an explanation wholly satisfactory to our bookish selves.
“What do women have?” I remember asking. I hated the way men were the heroes of everything.
“Women take lovers,” Dorinda said. “I know Nellie’s mother did, before Nellie was born, of course.” This last was added, quite illogically, to keep from hurting Nellie. We never attacked each other, and argued only about principles.
“Even after,” Nellie said, as though this was little more than a matter of correct information. “Everyone knew.”
By that time, of course, we had all boned up on the works of Emmanuel Foxx, and we honored Nellie’s paternal heritage. Only Len and I admitted to each other that we did not find Foxx’s writing riveting. I was guilty about this: after all, he was writing about a woman, and, interested in women, I could find few enough books that portrayed them in other than romantic modes. Perhaps I sensed, without being wise enough to know, that what Foxx had produced was not a woman’s thoughts, but a man’s fantasy of a woman’s thoughts. Despite Len and my doubts, which we kept to ourselves (my only disloyalty to Dorinda), Nellie existed in a golden glow whose reflection illuminated Dorinda almost as brightly, and even shone sufficiently on me to make me envied. I was consciously happy as part of the trio, and considered myself blessed. That is an emotion I read little of in other people’s accounts of their youth, but for me it was quite simply a magic time.
By now, I was telling my mother almost nothing of my daily (or nightly) life, though no doubt she knew enough of that crowd to have her suspicions. She spoke to me openly and sternly about the dangers of pregnancy and of letting boys get the better of me. I did not want her advice nor, after parrying Dorinda’s grandfather, did I need it. I intended to live my own life, take my experience where I might, and have a proud profession. Fortunately, Len was an honorable soul and did not challenge these naive decisions; also Dorinda’s sexual adventures provided enough vicarious experience to keep Nellie and me on the straight and narrow while we watched with delight and wonder Dorinda on her primrose path. So, at least in the beginning, I followed my mother’s advice after all but, I assured myself, only coincidentally, and for my own reasons.
Sometime in 1955, as I was rushing around a department store (of which there were many in those days cheek by jowl along Fifth Avenue), I met Eleanor Goddard in the nightwear department. The publishing house for which I worked had decided to send me to London, and I recognized the need for decent pajamas of the sort all women then wore. (Oddly enough, nightgowns, or nothing, seemed to come back with the women’s movement.) I was not preparing for a romantic encounter, but for the possible invitation to stay with someone, or to share a hotel room. It had been two years since I had seen Dorinda’s mother, and I babbled most of this out when we had scarcely got past our surprised hellos. Dorinda’s mother, listening in her quiet way to my rather long-winded account, latched on to only one word: London.
“I wonder if I might ask you to do me a kindness while you’re there,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “Anything.” I did not think of Dorinda and her family as often as I used to, but I never lost the sense of owing them almost everything except my literal birth and first twelve years. I used sometimes to imagine how I could ever pay them back. Much older now, I understand that their gifts, freely given without sacrifice, were generous enough, but not nearly as lovely nor as dearly bought as the bare minimum, as I saw it, my mother provided for me.
“Gabrielle Foxx is still in London,” Dorinda’s mother said. “Emmanuel’s widow,” she added after a moment, not wanting to assume I ought to know. She need not have worried; the story of Emmanuel Foxx and the beautiful aristocratic girl he had run off with were as unforgettable to me as any history I knew. “We haven’t heard from her in a very long time. Emile used sometimes to write; Gabrielle was never a great writer. Might you drop in on her while you are in London?” Emile, I recalled after only a moment’s effort—for he was fated from birth to be a minor player in the Foxx drama—was Emmanuel and Gabrielle’s son and Nellie’s father.
“Of course,” I said again. She wrote the address out for me on a pad she carried in her purse (she was always organized, always prepared; how else could that complicated household be run; I had always understood that).
“I’ll call you when I get back,” I told her. “If there seems to be any sort of problem, I’ll cable from London.” But I knew, short of imminent death, I would save my story for when I returned. Talking face to face to Dorinda’s mother and father about something so important as the Foxx family was not to be denied me, I saw little of Dorinda these days, but her family still held a kind of fascination for me that time could not lessen. “How is Dorinda?” I asked with a certain note of apology in my voice. I ought not to have had to ask.
“Fine. Quite wrapped up in being a mother.”
Dorinda had transmogrified herself, as completely, I chose to think, as a prince under a spell becomes a frog. It was unlikely now that this frog would ever be recalled to earlier radiance with a kiss, or by any other means. From the wildest of rich, mad, daring young women, hungry for sex and reckless adventure, Dorinda had, all in one day, it seemed, ordained the end of her giddy youth. She had married a surgeon, a man so dull and pompous that one could scarcely bear to spend an evening with him except for Dorinda’s sake, and produced two children within her first five years of marriage. The giddy joy she and Nellie and I had felt at being only children, bound to no siblings but each other, freely chosen, had somehow led Dorinda to deny her own offspring the same opportunity. Perhaps she feared where it might lead.
“Dorinda is pregnant again,” her mother said. “I’m sure she’d be glad to hear from you.” And thanking me again for my promise about Gabrielle Foxx, she left me to the contemplation of pajamas and a suitably ladylike robe. As I indicated my choice to the saleslady, I remembered Dorinda, like Virginia Woolf’s Sally Seton, running naked through the halls of the Jersey house, daring her parents’ proper guests to catch a glimpse. And now she had ended like Sally Seton, dully married, a lady, a mother several times over, all but unrecognizable.
Although we all three went to different colleges, we kept in close touch during those years; Nellie and I, for our different reasons, were hard-working, sober young women, content to have one boyfriend at a time ourselves yet eager to be stirred, amazed, sometimes horrified by Dorinda’s accounts of her adventures. She had begun by sleeping with the chauffeur one summer at the Jersey shore. Her parents had bought her a small runabout—to this day I can render every inch of that car, although I have forgotten so many of the faces from that time. It was gray, a Ford coupe, as they were called, with room only for two (three at a squeeze) in the front, and a rumble seat in the back. Nothing, not convertibles nor the various status cars that have come and gone in the course of my life, ever carried one hundredth of the glamour of that small Ford coupe.
The car appeared on Dorinda’s seventeenth birthday (always in the summer, always marked by glorious presents and celebrations; to this day, July 13th seems to me full of promise and nameless glee when I can scarcely remember the birthdays of those much closer to me now). The chauffeur was instructed to teach Dorinda to drive; he was a handsome young man, courteous and well mannered, doubtless holding that job because of some health reason, to earn money for his aging mother, something noble. I can’t remember why he wasn’t in the army; perhaps he had some unnoticeable but fatal illness—certainly it vastly increased his charms for us to think so.
Dorinda, eager to be rid of her virginity, seduced him in the car. When she told us about it, Nellie and I feared the nice young man would lose his job (that this was our fear tells me now a good deal about attitudes of the time), but we need not have worried. Dorinda got him to teach Nellie and me to drive. He behaved with perfect propriety toward the two of us, though we simultaneously dreaded (and hoped?) that he would exact the same price from us.
Dorinda’s sexual adventures continued from the year of the Ford coupe, becoming ever more daring, ever more random and, it seemed to Nellie and me, undiscriminating. There was also at this time the occasional rich scion who dallied with Dorinda until she told him, as she always did sooner or later, that she was Jewish. (She did not look Jewish, and having a gentile mother was, in fact, not Jewish by Jewish law, but she could never resist shocking anyone. She did not marry a Jew, however, and passed serenely into the higher reaches of New York’s WASP world, as it came to be called.)
It was at about this time when, as I now realize, Dorinda’s mother must have begun to guess at her daughter’s sexual exploits that she and I became closer. We were both, I now see, outsiders in that family into which Nellie was, after all, born; we were gentiles, we were conservative by nature, and made uncomfortable by flamboyant behavior. During our college years, I went to see Dorinda’s mother, who had by this time asked me to call her Eleanor, whenever I came to New York. I used to contemplate the possibility that she was my mother, that I had been handed over to my housekeeping parent for mysterious reasons never to be known. Certainly we understood each other far better than either of us understood our assigned partners in the mother-daughter dyad.
I know now that Eleanor was basically a conservative, unquestioning person, readily accepting the mores of her own class and the class into which she had married. Even so, I gave her little enough credit for understanding much more than her duties as a wealthy man’s wife. I know now that she, unlike my mother and Dorinda, comprehended the abyss I straddled because she straddled it herself. Then, I wanted more of life than Eleanor’s rich woman’s destiny—even though these women were supposed to be the freest, most handsomely endowed of all the women I saw in my youth. No matter what my feelings about my mother, I saw that she was, as a widow and working person, her own woman, even if employed by others. Eleanor worked just as hard at her glamorous life. Certainly she worried more, moment by moment, than my mother and seemed always invisibly to tremble with anxiety and fear. So I suppose I had some justification for thinking her incapable of autonomy or self-reliance. What was the point, I thought, of being rich if it only led to stress and anxiety? Eleanor worried before meals and after them, she worried about the yearly moves to and from the Jersey shore, she worried about the state of the country house, Sig’s impulsively invited guests (no wonder there was always enough food for the sailors), and above all, I suspected, she worried about the richly born people with whom she had to interact as if her past had been like theirs.
Because I understood instinctively the terrors of Eleanor’s life, it is easy enough to say now that I lacked a role model. Of course I did, but at least I had a chance at education, a chance to prepare myself, should I wish, for a nondomestic profession. That my mother ran houses for other women only made her a fool in my eyes; she was no less a domestic slave than the women she worked for. And, unlike Dorinda, I could not admire Hilda, who had married a famous man’s son. She had still, I thought, followed one of those few narrow paths allowed to women, using her sex to buy her way into an interesting life. Looking back now, I am almost certain that my mother disapproved as heartily of Hilda’s marriage to Emile as did Eleanor herself. But my mother never spoke to me about her views of the families she worked for, least of all the Goddards. And it was part of Eleanor’s code never to convey this to anyone except, I now see, eventually and only by implication, to me.
Eleanor and her sister-in-law Hilda, who married Emile Foxx, came from wildly disparate backgrounds and classes, but they were alike in being denied a chance even to go to college, much less to prepare for a career not emphatically female. So Eleanor had the choice of training to be a nurse, a schoolteacher, or a secretary, and chose the latter because she had had enough of nursing and children as the oldest in her large family. And Hilda, rich, spoiled, indulged as the recipient of all the luxuries the well-off could afford, had only her beauty and sense of adventure, inevitably sexual, to suggest a way of life. When Eleanor and Hilda met as sisters-in-law, they shared nothing but the husband-brother (his devotion to his sister probably surpassed that to his wife) and the table around which they occasionally, at the Jersey house and for family celebrations, together sat.
At the time Eleanor and I spoke in the nightwear department Hilda had died two years ago from cancer. Hilda’s was a life of almost catastrophic waste and misfortune, all arising from the necessity of the rich to raise their women to be beautiful objects of devotion without purpose and without sufficient discipline to live a life beyond the materialistic aims of their families.
These girls were educated at elegant schools, which never for a moment suggested to them the possibility of their undertaking a profession. Women worked only because they had to, and it was the pride of these successful men, as it was the pride of my mother’s sisters’ husbands, that their women need never lift a finger outside of their homes or the time they gave as charity in a noblesse oblige mood. My mother worked because my father, having died, could not support her. Had he deserted us, it would have come to the same thing. My aunts, like the daughters in the wealthy Jewish families for which my mother worked, had not gone to college. Either college was considered too expensive and unnecessary for women like my aunts and Eleanor, or too dangerous for women like Hilda. By the time of Dorinda and my generation, women of the upper middle class were, as an assumed right, sent to college by their wealthy fathers. I was able therefore to look back at that deprived generation of Hilda’s and understand what her situation must have been, wherein her desperation lay. Her sexual escapades, unlike Dorinda’s, lasted for life, as did her instability; it was almost as though if she stopped to ask herself what she was doing, she would vanish into thin air. And when the coming war found her in Europe, forced finally to think, to question her circumstances, she went mad. Dorinda’s father had to have her anesthetized and brought to America under the care of two nurses aboard one of the last civilian ships to make the ocean crossing.
To Eleanor, Hilda must have seemed like a mutant, or a creature from an unknown species. There is a picture of them together in the garden of the New Jersey house, before Hilda had met Emile, when Eleanor had just become a Goddard daughter-in-law. They are standing with the grandfather, his arm around his beloved and beautiful daughter Hilda. Eleanor stands at their side, her hair carefully done, her clothes exactly right, her stance awkward. It would be two years before Dorinda and Nellie were conceived, Dorinda after much effort, Nellie almost as an incidental event. I too was yet to be born. It was impossible for me to look at that snapshot without placing the three of us, Dorinda, Nellie, and I, into a sort of cloud of the unborn hovering above the picture. What my mother’s life was like at that time never interested me in the slightest.
The story of Dorinda’s birth is easily enough told. She was conceived after many months of despair and born after an atrocious labor. Her father, Sig, finally shown the large, bruised female infant, snorted and said that she looked like a Jewish comedian. I knew this, because he had often told Dorinda who had told me. Yet I imagine him, with his careless ways, worrying at that very moment about his cherished sister Hilda, pregnant in France.
Eleanor had been Sig’s secretary; perhaps he married her because she was docile, efficient, and orderly; perhaps because she would not sleep with him otherwise. Sig was so attractive that a woman refusing him was no doubt a novelty. Eleanor told me, in later years, that although the Goddards insisted as a matter of course that she hire a nursemaid for Dorinda, she used to follow the nurse along the streets at a discreet distance to make sure her child was safe. Occasionally, she would insist on taking Dorinda, in her elegant pram, out on her own. It was as though, she later told me, Dorinda knew she had someone controllable in charge. She would hold her breath in anger at whatever direction Eleanor was taking, and turn bluer and bluer before the eyes of her horrified mother, until Eleanor gave in and went where Dorinda wanted to go. Eleanor assumed, I don’t know on what evidence, that the nurses never had this problem.
When the nurse had become a governess, certainly later still when I first knew Dorinda, Eleanor had learned to wear her robes of ladyhood more naturally. She was, in fact, a natural lady, but it took her some years to trust herself and her authority, at least with her servants and in the Goddard circle. I don’t think she ever believed herself to have any control over Dorinda. She would tell me stories of Dorinda’s triumph, rather as though this proved not so much her own falterings as Dorinda’s spirit. She must have been the most astonished of us all when Dorinda suddenly turned conventional. It was almost as though her mother’s genes suddenly sprang into action twenty years later.
In Europe, meanwhile, Hilda wore her beautiful clothes while moving with infinite grace and wealth in artistic circles. There were nightclubs, of course, and the gay life between the wars. Somehow, although I can picture everything else about the Goddards’ life before I came into it, my imagination refuses to cross the ocean. I know only what Eleanor, Dorinda, Nellie, and the later biographies of Emmanuel Foxx told me—that Hilda, early into her European career, met Emmanuel Foxx and became, as had so many women, his slave. Hilda, who could not pick up her own underwear or scrawl letters on her own behalf, typed manuscripts for Foxx and helped him out in numerous ways, some costing only money, but others effort, tedium, and even pain.
Gabrielle, Emmanuel’s wife, loathed Hilda from the first; more accurately, I suppose, she feared her: her beauty, her money, her fascination for Emmanuel. But in the end Emmanuel proved resistant to Hilda’s charms, if not to her money or efforts. So she turned her brilliance upon Emmanuel and Gabrielle’s twenty-year-old son, Emile. She was older than he, and far more practiced at the flirtation game. He had been dragged around Europe after his father, who was always in search of better conditions, better ways to pay the rent, more attentive women and patrons. Dorinda told me before Nellie came that Nellie, like her father, spoke four languages, all of them with a special precision that reveals the language as not one’s own. Emile and Nellie were excellent linguists with no mother tongue. Nellie came to America and the Goddards so eagerly, not only because of the war, but because here was a place to which she might, at least for a few years, belong.
Shortly after Hilda and Emile started their affair, people began referring to him as a gigolo. I suppose it was hard not to. In all the surviving photographs he stands with Hilda in a group, she at the center, he on the edge looking sulky and rather out of place. But she must have fascinated him with her beauty, her practiced arts of wiliness, her wealth, and her carelessness about the cost of anything. When she became pregnant, Emmanuel Foxx insisted that they marry; he wanted an heir, someone to carry on his name. Everyone assumed, including Emmanuel himself, that he wanted a male heir, but when Nellie was born he announced that, since the protagonist of his famous novel was a woman, it was only right that his heir be a woman also. She was named after the character in his great novel, but was always called Nellie by everyone who knew her.
Once Hilda had tired of posing for beautiful pictures with the newborn baby, she turned Nellie over to nurses. But Gabrielle, Emmanuel’s wife, intervened. She took over her grandchild, an act of which Emmanuel heartily approved, and so Nellie lived with them for the most part, as did her father in the late thirties once he had tired of Hilda and his role as husband to a still wildly flirtatious woman. (Peggy Guggenheim was reputed to have insisted that her lovers try all the positions pictured on the walls of some building in Pompeii where women were not allowed to enter but into which Peggy Guggenheim had bribed her way. Whether this is true or not, it was Hilda’s boast also. Doubtless new lovers were as essential to this frantic game as were new positions.) But although Nellie lived with her grandparents and her father, it was to her mother’s family she gladly, eagerly came when she got the chance. Emmanuel wanted her safe; Emile had taken to drinking so constantly that his opinion was neither sought nor given. What Gabrielle thought no one asked or perhaps cared. Nellie at least knew that her grandmother would miss her, and used to write her letters in which she tried to sound loving, but could scarcely conceal how good a time she was having, how happy she was to be in America with the Goddards, Dorinda, and me.
When I arrived in London later that year after meeting Eleanor in the store, I wondered if Gabrielle would remember me as the third girl in Nellie’s letters. I had thought of Gabrielle so often over the years, had heard so much of her from Nellie and from the Goddards, that I felt we could meet as old acquaintances. If, of course, she was not too old to find a place for me among her sad memories.
Upon Emmanuel Foxx’s death, not long after Nellie’s departure for the States, Gabrielle dropped into obscurity. Literary admirers and adorers put up with wives if they must as part of the price of the noble man’s presence. But without the great author, a wife, unless she is literary executor and a tight guarder of the reputation and literary leavings, like the widow of T. S. Eliot, is as unregarded as his merest belongings, more likely, indeed, considered fit only as rummage.
As always, it was the Goddards who came to the rescue. They sent Gabrielle a monthly check which they hoped but hardly dared expect would not be spent largely on Emile’s alcoholic needs. And then, quite suddenly, Emile disappeared during the war, picked up, it was suspected, by the Nazis who were by this time ruling Paris. There was some hope that he had pulled himself together, stopped drinking, joined the Resistance and either gone into hiding or been killed heroically in some action against the Germans. But no one could find out anything about him. Emile’s disappearance was, perhaps, the last straw for Gabrielle. She was alive; money reached her. This was all the Goddards were able to establish during the war.
After the liberation of Prance, Sig Goddard managed to learn that Gabrielle still lived in a part of the old Foxx apartment. She had been cared for by several gallant women who had considered Emmanuel Foxx the great writer of his time, but had few illusions about his character or his thought for the needs of his wife should she survive him. Genius makes its own rules, they admitted that, but others must look out for the nonliterary leavings of his genius. And, most moving of all, particularly, as Sig Goddard said in his usual sardonic manner, given the parsimony and penny-pinching of the French, a restaurant owner whose restaurant the Foxx family had often dined in before the war offered Gabrielle a free meal every day. Eleanor mentioned to me at our meeting that she had, characteristically, thanked the man and sent him a suitable gift.
There had been a real effort made to bring Gabrielle over for Dorinda’s wedding. Nellie had telegraphed to London pleading with her to come. But she said she was too old, that Nellie must represent her. I think we all knew then that Nellie ought to go to London to see her grandmother.
It was a huge wedding, at the Harmonie Club, with Nellie and me as bridesmaids. My mother was also invited, and I was in a secret panic that she would do or say something to disgrace me, but in fact she behaved perfectly correctly, and even seemed to enjoy herself My mother, whom I had never thought of as a dancer—the very last skill in the world one would expect of her—having been asked to waltz by some man as a kind gesture, proved herself so graceful and gay that she danced all during the wedding and allowed me, when in my embarrassment and trepidation I dared to look at her, to see what she might have been if some gaiety had been allowed or available in her life.
Her dancing that way shocked me for another, secret reason. I had always been, in private, a wild dancer, whirling around the room, my head full of fantasies, my body moving in a way no ballroom dancing could ever permit. Years later, when the young began dancing opposite one another, but each moving in his or her own way, I recognized the kind of social dancing that I might have been good at. But I could never follow a man in dancing; I always wanted to move faster, to go at my own pace. Oddly enough, as it seemed then but as I should have perceived as an omen, Dorinda had no trouble with ballroom dancing, moving in her partner’s arms as though his leading her was all she wanted of life. I never mentioned my private wild dancing to my mother; I only danced when alone, with a record on and no one to see or hear me. Some time ago I stopped, and have never taken up dancing again. Perhaps walking, to which I am addicted, took its place, perhaps the fantasies that accompanied my dancing receded with the years. At Dorinda’s wedding, I danced a few obligatory rounds, and then sat at the table drinking champagne and trying not to watch my mother, unable not to watch her.
The Harmonie Club, where the wedding was held, was and probably still is—I have never taken the time to notice—at 60th Street off Fifth Avenue. It was a club for wealthy Jews who were not accepted at the usual clubs suitable to their social class. The club, I remember Dorinda telling me, took only German Jews, never Eastern European, and was very strict in its membership standards. Dorinda, dressed in a gorgeous bridal gown, walked down the aisle on her father’s arm as though there had never been a gray Ford coupe or the men of her college years, with Nellie and me right behind her in matching pale-blue gowns paid for, needless to say, by the Goddards.
The groom waited in full regalia with his equally boring best man and claimed her the way they did in the movies of our childhood, but neither Nellie nor I was fooled. He hated us, and Dorinda’s separation from us began with her wedding. But, as it happened, Nellie was off to London to visit her grandmother after Dorinda’s wedding, a trip to London for which the Goddards paid, and I was to begin work as an assistant editor, really a secretary, in the publishing business, a job found for me, needless again to say, by the Goddards.
Dorinda walked down the aisle into the arms of her stuffy surgeon-to-be and out of the intimacy Nellie and I had offered her for the better part of our lives.
As I marched down the aisle behind Dorinda I revolved the ring on my right hand as a kind of talisman, signifying all that the Goddards and Dorinda had meant to me. It was—it still is—a Jensen ring, from the old days when the Jensen store was on Fifth Avenue and sold what I thought the most beautiful jewelry in the world. For my sixteenth birthday, the birthday after the night with the Capehart, the night I met Len, Dorinda and her mother went with me to buy me a ring. I chose the same ring Dorinda already had; the Jensen models were famous, and available year after year. The silver in the ring was carved with leaves, and the stone was a moonstone; I had always admired Dorinda’s, had always longed for just that ring. I remember, though I politely pretended not to hear, that it cost thirty-five dollars, a huge sum then, almost unbelievable now. I left the store with the ring, vowing never to remove it; indeed, I have not removed it for long. It contained, so I fancied, all of our youth, for I had read some such phrase in a novel.
So I turned the ring on my finger walking down the aisle at Dorinda’s wedding, perhaps to distract me from the farce in which I was taking part; I suddenly remembered also one of the first nights I spent with Dorinda in New York, after my first summer with her. The Goddards had taken us all in a taxi to Rumpelmayer’s, and while we were ordering our sodas, a taxi driver came up, led by the manager, to say he had found my purse in his cab after he had left us off. I claimed, ashamed and guilty, the brown cloth bag he held out, first to Dorinda, then to me. I remember Mr. Goddard reaching into his pocket for some money with which to tip the driver. I knew my purse, which was an old one of my mother’s, was worth less than the tip.
And there was another memory, too, which followed that one. It was of Dorinda’s birthday party, that first summer. All the daughters of the families at the shore were invited. And each of us found, at our places when we finally sat down for dinner, a pencil box with our names in gold on the cover. When the box was opened, there was a row of pencils, each with a name. My box had my name. The pencils had my name. I kept the pencils and the box for years. It was Eleanor, of course, who had planned it all, who had included me.
It was Eleanor I would be repaying by doing my task in London well. Or, the realist in me added, by doing it at all.
My trip to London was hardly as glamorous as it sounded. I was being sent to assist a man who had been my boss in New York, but who had moved to London in the course of marital upheavals that were the riveting subject of gossip then, and about which I remember nothing. He had at first been considering moving to Paris to set up a French publishing office but, to my infinite relief, he had chosen London instead.
By the time I joined him there, my publishing career had already declared itself as in the business, not the literary or editorial, end. I was very good at figures, very efficient and quick, just like my mother, though such a thought would hardly have occurred to me. I housekept for publishers instead of for Our Crowd and the other rich. There was, I suppose I now see, very little difference.
Paris has never held any particular delights for me. I recognize the amazement such a statement evokes, but I am one of those who seems somehow never to have been part of the convictions of a generation or culture. I remember once reading about Irwin Edman, who had been young in the twenties, and he said his youth had been nothing like the flaming years he always read about. True, he was a philosopher, and perhaps had not found Scott Fitzgerald a spokesman for his desires or ambitions.
I have never been much of a traveler, and though I have loved cities, Paris is not a city, or so it seemed to me, for a lonely woman looking for streets in which to walk and bookstores (replete, of course, with books old and new in the English language) in which to browse. London is such a city; so was New York in those days. In Paris, one seemed always to be on the outside. Nor, I suspected, would that change if I went there on business; people might have to talk to me in a businesslike way, answer my questions, discuss relevant matters, but I doubted that such would prove to be the case. I spoke French, but with a heavy American accent. The whole language of sexuality, so essential to French interchanges of all sorts, was unknown to me, nor did I honor it. I had found the French, during my one visit there a few years before, to be operating, in their attitudes toward money, sex, intellectual (as opposed to practical) ideas, clothes, and food, on a plane altogether too elevated for me. I see now that it was not my accent alone which ostracized me; it was also my total indifference to the many signs I missed, the many gestures I scorned. Blunt people have never recommended themselves to the French. When, later, I read the books of Nancy Mitford, I understood why I was destined always to be desolate in France. I enjoyed her writings, but knew that in her world, I would have been one of the clumsy ones caricatured in her novels.
I had even been in love the time I had spent in Paris, had met Len there again, had made that kind of young, frantic love, interrupted only by meals and idyllic walks under the chestnut trees. We loved, we walked entwined, but we did not admire the chestnut trees, pollarded and, in our view, tortured. The weather seemed to us gray, wet, and dark. We found the waiters supercilious and unkind. Frenchmen at nearby tables, overhearing us, insisted on telling us what was the matter with America. I was very glad my adulterous boss had decided on London, and doubly grateful when I was enabled, thereby, to do a favor for Eleanor and to enter, once more, into the affairs of her fascinating family, the family into which she had, perhaps so unhappily, married.
It was unclear that Gabrielle’s marriage had been any easier than Eleanor’s to bear. Yet she had run off with Emmanuel to Paris, dizzy with rapture, giddy with a kind of joy I had never known, nor, I secretly thought, wanted to. It would be many years before I discovered that, as some Frenchman had said in an aphorism I found, among French aphorisms, uniquely accurate, there are those who love and those who consent to be loved. That rapture, that dizziness, belongs only to those who love, and the price they pay, the price Gabrielle had paid, seemed to me too high. It was later, when I came to this understanding, that I began to wonder if Eleanor had loved as Gabrielle had loved. Of course, I thought, that is the only explanation. And like Gabrielle, she had lived to experience the perils of marrying the object of one’s passion.
Gabrielle’s family cut her off without a shilling, as was thought only proper. She laughed in their faces. I suppose the life in Paris was attractive, with its artists, its expatriates, its life on the Left Bank. But it is one thing to be a careless Hemingway; it is quite another to try and manage a household and a child on the irregular earnings of a genius. Gabrielle was patronized, anxious, and in exile. But she seldom went back to London even when Emmanuel did, and though she was supposed to have made overtures to her family, these were never reciprocated.
The Goddards never knew quite why she had returned. She wrote them only that she was now living in rooms in Kensington, address provided so that the allowance could be sent, and hoped they were well; she was as ever grateful to them for their kindness. Eleanor had once told me there was nothing in Gabrielle’s gratitude to suggest that the Goddards were providing more than her due. I was still too uncertain of my own gratitude to the Goddards to be able to judge Gabrielle’s. I liked to think that my gratitude was uncomplicated, but my moments of resentment, however disguised as resentment at Dorinda for having turned out so disappointingly, warned me that a high moral tone toward Gabrielle was hardly justified.
The romantic story of Emmanuel and Gabrielle was as well known to me as any romance in literature—and literature comprises more of romance than of reality. If Romeo and Juliet had not died at the end of the play, how would they have lived? Did Shakespeare suggest, in The Winter’s Tale, that a man can love his wife twenty years hence only if she is preserved in the fullness of her twenty-year-old beauty? Emmanuel and Gabrielle were almost Shakespearean in their love, or so it seemed still in 1955 when I went in search of sixty-six-year-old Gabrielle. Her son was dead; her husband was dead, after a short, painful, ultimately fatal illness; her granddaughter was an ocean away. Only I, the least connected to her of the three in our generation, was on my way to visit. Gloomy enough she might be, but still, even I expected her to be redolent of a great love. I had read somewhere that the old looked backward into the past, rediscovering and reliving. What a great past to have, what a great love. True, I would have wanted no such love for myself. But if one had to fling oneself thoughtlessly, carelessly, into the torrent of passion, how much better that passion’s object should be a great writer, the great creator of a female hero.
Gabrielle had met Emmanuel when she was sixteen. It was always assumed, on the basis of family (Goddard) gossip, that she had allowed him “everything” on their first encounter. Emmanuel had been a visitor at Gabrielle’s family home, a huge castlelike place (it may have become grander in the telling), brought there by one of Gabrielle’s brothers who introduced Emmanuel as the great writer of the future. How often are such introductions prophetic? If Emmanuel was not yet a great writer, he was already a man of extraordinary appeal, especially to women; a man, I have always supposed, like Rodin, or Augustus John, larger than life, large in his form and in his claims on life. Gabrielle adored him at first sight. “Whoever loved who loved not at first sight?” I have always assumed that Marlowe’s line (my view is reinforced by the context in which Shakespeare quotes it) applies only to philanderers or those who know nothing of marriage.
She offered to show him the park, the lake with the ducks, the wild garden, and lay with him under a grove of beech trees, in the dappled shade beneath their thick leaves. When she ran off with him to Paris shortly thereafter, she must have been already pregnant with Emile, who was born nine months later. They were married in Paris by an official when they knew her to be carrying a child. Emmanuel had not been caught in marriage before, but this was (so the Goddards said) the first, or at any rate the youngest, virgin he had taken, and this fact convinced him that she was bearing his son and heir to carry on his name. Perhaps because Emile was such a disappointment, he welcomed Nellie’s gender; that, at least, was my surmise.
Gabrielle’s family was utterly unforgiving. Her father followed her to Paris, but when he caught up to the fleeing couple, which took some weeks, Emmanuel told him Gabrielle was pregnant and about to be married. The father, according to Goddard legend, announced that from that moment on he had no daughter, turned on his heel and departed. I always wondered if the brothers had made any attempt to see her—they were older, and certainly had some money of their own—but apparently they were conventional, or as jealous of family position as their parents. Gabrielle’s mother died soon after—from a broken heart, the Goddards assured me. She had loved her daughter, and blamed herself. Had she lived she might have understood Gabrielle’s impulses, and supported her later in life. But she was wholly under her husband’s thumb, and lost, with Gabrielle’s elopement, her only reason for living. A romantic story, if ever there was one.
The Goddards supposed, on whatever evidence supported their wonderful stories of Emmanuel Foxx, that Gabrielle had, from time to time, written to her relatives for help, but none was forthcoming. Her letters, in the best English manner, were returned unopened. A second baby was stillborn, and the Foxxes had no more children. Considering the mess they made of Emile, that was probably just as well, or so I thought in 1955 in my arrogantly intolerant and jejune way.
But what, I remembered having asked Dorinda sometime after Nellie arrived, did they do in the war? I prided myself on being the historian in the group, tidy with facts as I liked to think myself, and aware that my father had been in the war before he ever met my mother. Dorinda did not know, but she asked at dinner, and her father said that Emmanuel had been almost forty at the time of the war, not conscripted by the French at first, and eventually found to have a heart murmur and an ulcer, which kept him out of the army. He retreated to the French countryside with his family, and continued to work on his novel, of far more importance, in his opinion, than the war.
One of Gabrielle’s brothers was killed, and the other wounded, but that did not soften her father’s heart, nor that of the surviving brother. Gabrielle helped Emmanuel with his writing, and tried to find enough food for him and the boy. It must have been a hard time. When I tried to picture it, I always thought of what I heard of the French countryside in World War II movies and stories, so that, in a strange way, Emile as a boy in one war and Emile as a member of the Resistance in another blurred in my mind.
The demands of my boss in London were many, and my time was filled with helping him to set up his office there and generally playing what was, in the fifties, considered the proper role of a woman assistant to an editor: the role of wife. Academic wives played the same role, of course, often to an extent unknown or unsuspected at the time. I well remember when, many years later, Queenie Leavis, the wife of that most terrifying and influential critic of his time, F. R. Leavis, admitted in an interview years after his death that she had done all the research for his famous books and written the greater part of them. So we who assisted the male publishers and writers did the research and typing and sometimes the writing, leaving them to get the credit and scurry about, meeting people. In those days Time and Life magazines were widely read, and on their staffs the men were the writers; the women, banned from that title, were “researchers.” In my ease, I eventually ran the office of the top men, not only as a secretary (they had a secretary separate from me) but as chief accountant, publicist, and, in many cases, decision maker.
It was thus not until I had been in London several weeks that I attempted to telephone Gabrielle, requesting an appointment. She turned out not to be, as the English said, “on” the telephone. Not to be on the telephone was less surprising then, less unusual than it would be now, but still amazing to my American self. I was forced, therefore, to write a letter, which, the blessed English mails not yet having achieved, like postal Service everywhere else, their nadir, reached Gabrielle in the morning. She wrote an answer immediately which reached me the same afternoon, perhaps, as I look back on it now, the most unlikely event of all, looked at from this time to that. She asked me to come and see her at three o’clock the next day. Leaving my boss in a frenzy I could well imagine but did not go into the office to witness, I took the day off, walking the streets to think what I would say, to plan how I would begin my letter to Eleanor, and to buy some delicacies for Gabrielle.
I discovered her home was a ground-floor flat in a converted house on the edge of Kensington which the landlady, whom I met when I rang the bell, declared to be really in Knightsbridge. The landlady had lain in wait for me, Gabrielle’s first visitor ever. Gabrielle must have told her I was coming, but little else. My American accent in no way precluded her immediate assumption that I was family; perhaps she thought I was Nellie. She told me how worried she was about Gabrielle, who never stirred from her rooms, who paid the “girl” to get her groceries and other necessities, who really was not the sort of lodger she, the landlady, really wanted, but after all the money came regular, didn’t it, and you couldn’t just put the poor thing out on the streets. Still chattering, she led me down the hall and past a stairway to Gabrielle’s door. I thanked her, and stood there, staring her down, forcing her to leave me before I knocked. I wanted to be alone when I faced Gabrielle.
When I finally saw her, when Gabrielle opened the door and stood aside for me to enter, she claimed my attention with a sudden pungency no one, not even Nellie when she arrived in America, not even Dorinda when I first saw her, had equaled. All of that, I now understood, had been preparation for this moment. My life was, after all, more like a romance than a realistic biography. I had often thought about this, and discussed it inwardly, as I discussed most things once Dorinda resigned (as I saw it) from our childhood, once Dorinda and Nellie and I were separated. It is in romances, in fairy stories, in the kind of tales girls imagine, that events happen, fetching the young woman from her mundane destiny and placing her in a different, richer, more adventurous world. So it had happened to me: first, the Goddards, then Nellie, now Gabrielle. There was, furthermore, a reason why it was persistent, slightly dull, hard-working I, Anne, to whom all this happened, rather than Dorinda or Nellie, who seemed so much more obviously chosen by destiny for a starring role. Gabrielle required someone receptive like me. Eleanor, I surmised, would have done, but Eleanor was too entangled in her husband’s life, too ancillary, too much a creature of the Goddards.
To me, just short of thirty, Gabrielle looked old and disreputable that day when I first caught sight of her. That is the right phrase: “caught sight of her.” As though I had her at last in my vision, captured from my imagination. No doubt I had passed each day in New York or London women of sixty-six whom I would have thought neither old nor haggard because cosmetics and dieting had preserved their youthful appearance. Gabrielle looked every year and more of her age. It did not take me long, however, to discover her vitality, the vigor that is not the imitation of youth, the passing as young, but is genuine, having nothing to do with the impersonation of youth as fashionable women represented it. Gabrielle’s hair, a mottled gray and white, had been cut off at her ears; I was conventional enough at that first meeting to yearn on her behalf for a “good” haircut. She wore a long, formless dress, with an old cardigan over it: this house, like all English houses at that time, was cold. Her feet, with stockings of some thickish, peasanty material, were in what looked like men’s slippers; her hands were large, with closely clipped nails and thickish fingers. All this I took in at a glance, without the words, as a revelation. Why is it that figures who appear in revelations are always beautiful, like angels? Why for that matter do we think of angels as always beautiful? I do not mean I instantly thought of Gabrielle as an angel; I mean that something in me assented to her, something recognized her, something said: “So here you are.”
“Come in, then,” she said. Her accent was pure upper-class English, the sort you hear less of now in England than you did then. In those days all the announcers on the BBC talked with Oxford accents; the Beatles, like the now ubiquitous intonations from Australia, Yorkshire, the Midlands, the East End, were in the future. Yet the purity of her speech struck me even at that time.
There was an electric fire in the fireplace, into which she popped a coin taken from a dish of them on a table nearby. I understood from that action that she kept her money for what mattered to her: warmth, a large room, her own bathroom, tips for the “girl” who fetched food and other items. She did not waste it on appearances or what did not directly serve. She had a radio, on which, in a few hours, she would listen to the news, and, in the evening, to music. Even at first glance, hers seemed to me a remarkably sensible arrangement.
My plan had been to ask her out to dinner; I relinquished it almost immediately. Her life was here and nowhere else. She had access to a garden in the back belonging to all the houses surrounding it. I supposed, or chose to believe, that she went out there from time to time to catch a breath of air. When I asked her, she told me that she stood at the open window sometimes at night, but never went out in the day. There were children there for whom she was a natural victim: she seemed to accept this as inevitable. She did not like children. As she said this, I realized that I did not like children either, had not even liked them when I was a child, except for Dorinda and Nellie, who were not children but, like me, small adults waiting for their transformation.
“Sit down,” she said. I sat in a chair on the other side of the fireplace with its electric bars, a chair she had clearly put there for me before my arrival. There was no permanent need for two chairs by the heat. I sat down, still in my coat: the room was far from warm. “How is Nellie?” she asked.
“Nellie’s fine,” I said. “Just fine.” It seemed inadequate as a response let alone as news, but she accepted it. Nellie, with her quiver of languages, had gone to work for an international bank and was doing very well. Like me, she had not married, seeing it as a trap. Neither she nor I had been fooled by the marriages of the world Dorinda belonged to; only Dorinda had been fooled by that. Perhaps one needed my mother and Hilda as models in order to have sufficient strength to avoid marriage, which every woman of our generation pursued as the golden fleece it so obviously, to them, was.
“Single like you,” she said, echoing my thoughts. “Working; supporting herself. Good girl. And she made use of her languages, which Emile only saw as depriving him of a mother tongue. It broke my heart to let her go to America, but I knew if she stayed with me she would be doomed like me. Like Emile.”
“Are you still doomed?” I asked. I have often, again and again, thought back to that question and why I asked it. It came to me as an inspiration. Inspiration is rare: a form of telepathy, or insight, a revelation that may be unique in a lifetime, requiring a lifetime’s preparation. Certainly everything in my life had prepared me to ask, as though inspired, that question.
“No,” she said. “I’m not. That’s why I agreed to see you. You are the messenger.”
Of course, being not yet thirty, I wondered for one frightful moment if she were mad. She must have seen that speculation in my face. “Perhaps more than a messenger,” she said. “Perhaps a friend. You are exactly Nellie’s age,” she added in what was clearly, for her, a sequitur. “Would you like some tea?”
I accepted the tea gladly, real English tea, strong, with milk in it. She had, I now noticed, a kettle on a hot plate. We sipped our tea, and looked at one another; I had a sense of possibility that nothing, not even coming to live with Dorinda, had given me. I waited for her to speak, just to hear her voice, not expecting at this point anything profound.
“Foxx used to say the English upper classes drink tea as a sacrament. He was right; he was always right about the English classes. It’s certainly better than wine; it’s nobody’s blood except the lower classes’, no savior mixed up with it.” And she let out a hoot. For the first time I saw her smile, reassuring me after the loud sound. Hers was a smile of overwhelming sweetness, redeeming the chopped-off hair and the ruined English skin filled with tiny broken veins; a smile of love and intelligence, rare as large rubies. I sipped my tea and a sensation of pure pleasure swept over me, like a rush of contentment, but far more pervasive than contentment, joy I suppose. When my mother went through the menopause she suffered from hot flashes; she described them as subsuming her, capturing her body as thoroughly as pleasure might, if only hot flashes were pleasure. Subsumed, I felt that pleasure now.
We did not hurry. I had placed my bag of delicacies on the floor soon after I entered, and I never knew what became of them. Perhaps Gabrielle gave them to the landlady, or to the “girl.” I never saw Gabrielle eat, she did not invite me to a meal, I did not think of food when I was with her. We only drank tea, endless cups of it. Now I sat, drinking my tea and looking around the large room.
There were papers everywhere, on every chair, table, even next to the hot plate, in fact on every surface, including most of the floor. I had followed the path between the stacks of paper to the electric heater and the chairs almost by instinct; I was used to this sort of disorder; Dorinda had never put anything away, and I had to battle with myself at first to restrain the sense of tidiness imbibed with my mother’s milk. Gabrielle took it for granted that, once having looked around, I would understand that this was not disorder but discovery, and the ordering of her life.
“They have started coming again,” she said. “All those scholars, all those academic snoopers, hoping for letters, for memories, for my stories. You’re the only one I’ve agreed to see. The landlady acts as though she does me a favor, letting me live here. Perhaps she could get more for this set of rooms. But I bribe her, all the time, with money and anything else (her eyes went to my bag from Fortnum and Mason.) And she turns them all away; all but you. I told her to let you in. The truth is, until you came, I couldn’t decide if it was you or Nellie. I’m glad it’s you; Nellie has her life to get on with.”
I don’t know why I failed to find offensive this assumption about my life as being something there was no need to get on with. Partly because it was true: I pretended greater interest in the world of publishing than I felt or, if not greater interest, greater commitment. Also, I had always the sense of awaiting a destiny, and this might be it.
“They are Foxx’s letters?” I asked.
“Some. They are mostly my letters, letters I wrote him every day for years, putting down my thoughts, my passions, my fantasies, sexual fantasies mostly. Telling him how I thought of arousing him, recalling the excitement, the frenzy of doing many things I never really did. He let me write it instead of doing it; he said I was the most devoted to the missionary position of anyone he had ever met. The truth is, it was, finally, the easiest way.”
“But you were so rarely apart.” I had read what biographies there were; I was fully informed on all that was known of Foxx, his life, and his passionate heroine. The various outré sexual acts he had demanded of his heroine, acts she had performed with passionate commitment and enjoyment, floated into my mind. I tried to attach them, at however distant a time, to this large woman sitting across from me in her felt slippers and cardigan.
“We were never apart. He dragged me with him all over Europe. He said I was his muse. Ha! I wrote each day in my room; he locked me in. He wouldn’t even let me go to the baby if he cried. I learned to write very fast.”
“And these are the letters?”
“Yes, mostly letters. I can scarcely bring myself to read them over. I have thought of burning them.”
“Burning them! Oh, you mustn’t; that would be a sacrilege.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Tell me why!”
I must not remain silent, I knew. I must not hesitate. I must not say the wrong thing. “Because they are the words of a woman,” I said. “They are your words. Why should the world think they are his?”
I had said the right thing. Later I would wonder if those words forced from her were indeed her words, or, like the words of masochistic women in pornographic novels, men’s fantasies, really, women saying what men wanted them to say, pretending to feel what men wanted them to feel. But I did not mention this. It was always possible that there was more than sex acts here, that there were thoughts, ambitions, hidden hopes. After all, Foxx’s heroine had wild ambitions, manly dreams, even the love of women.
For some reason I thought of Dorinda at that moment, of her wild girlhood, of her frenzied pursuit of experience, mostly sexual, of the conventions in which she had immured herself. Her wedding had indeed been a rite of passage, an initiation into proper womanhood. Why had I not thought of that then?
“Have more tea,” Gabrielle said. She was, I knew, as she shuffled over to the kettle—her felt slippers were too large for her—deciding what next. Eventually, she decided on the next day. I must come tomorrow. At teatime. We would talk more then.
And so, without more tea, I was dismissed. Gabrielle turned from the kettle. But her face was kind; she smiled. I had no choice, although I did not want to go. I rose, still in my coat, gathered up my purse, and walked through the door she held open for me. I wanted to stay, but I could not find a reason to do so.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” she answered, giving me a wave before she shut the door to her apartment.
The landlady was waiting for me. “Fine, is she?” she asked.
“Has she been ill?” I answered in what I hoped was a partly patrician manner.
“Oh, yes,” the landlady said. “She has fits. Very queer, she becomes, very queer indeed. Well, you’ll be here to see to her now. Her granddaughter, that’s right, innit?”
I left because Gabrielle wanted me to, but with a terrible premonition that no call upon rationality that night or the following day could assuage.
I arrived the next day as early as could possibly be considered time for tea. The landlady was waiting for me.
“She was on the floor; the girl and I got her onto her bed, I’ll never know how and that’s the truth. She wouldn’t let no one come, she won’t drink nothing. She just wants to talk with you. She wanted the girl to go and fetch you, but I didn’t know where you were staying, did I? We’ve been watching out for you, I can tell you.”
She tried to come into Gabrielle’s rooms with me, but I pushed her back, gently I hoped, and closed the door. Gabrielle was pale; she looked ill, her breathing was in short gasps, and there seemed to my horrified ears to be a sort of rumbling, a rasp, with each breath. She pulled at my sleeve, making me sit beside her on the bed.
“Take the papers. All of them. I’ve written it out for the landlady, I wrote it before, I had only to put in your name last night. Don’t leave without the papers. There are sacks, enough of them. Pack up the papers.” She pointed to a sack near her chair; I could see that she had begun packing the papers into it, probably last night. She had overdone it and collapsed.
“You’re only sixty-six years old,” I said, as though I were pleading with her to reconsider her arithmetic and with it her illness. She ignored me.
“Pack them all up,” she said. “Take them all away with you tonight. Tell them to get you a taxi. Pay them well, very well. The landlady, the girl, the taxi man. They will do what you want for money. Here.”
She plucked at her skirt, indicating, as I soon understood, her pocket. I reached into it with her encouragement and removed a large packet of bank notes. This was, of course, before England went onto the metric system. I mention that here because the old English money had a kind of magic to it, it was like play money to me, it was the stuff of dreams, which the new pound notes, five- and ten-pound notes, never would be.
I nodded my agreement.
“Take them somewhere,” she said. “Maybe another country. I don’t have the money. Have you the money?” She was frantic now. I told her that I had the money; that I would take the papers to a bank somewhere safe, perhaps to a bank in Zurich, Switzerland—in my own frenzy, Switzerland and bank vaults collided in my mind and stuck there together. I told her that I would put them in a large safety-deposit box—a vault, as I seemed determined to call it. “Do it now! Pack them up! I want to watch you.”
I did it. I have played that scene over and over in the years that followed, watched myself gather up the papers and stuff them into the canvas sacks she had acquired. I seemed to myself even then to be playing a scene from a war movie, working with desperation, the Gestapo at my heels, threatening to descend at any moment. But there was no Gestapo. And the landlady would have done anything for the money I gave her. She could see I was not trying to carry off her furniture; what did she care about papers? She was delighted to be part of the drama. Later, I realized that she might have been one of those moral, law-abiding English women who insist on calling the police, on making sure everything is just so. Never before or since have I been so grateful for perfidy. How could she know I was not robbing Gabrielle, not stripping her of her most valued possessions? True, Gabrielle appeared to have condoned my actions, but by now she was breathing with even more difficulty, keeping her eyes closed most of the time, until, suddenly, she would seem to become panic-stricken and then, seeing me, would be reassured that I was there, that this was what she wanted.
When I had finished with the packing, I took Gabrielle’s hand; I told her I would be back to see her tomorrow, perhaps later tonight.
“No,” she said. “Go now, go as soon as ever you can. As soon as ever you can.” And she closed her eyes.
We called a taxi and put Gabrielle’s two canvas sacks into it; I rewarded the landlady with yet more money. Throughout the ride I sat in the taxi clinging to the sacks as though someone might hold up the taxi and claim them. After getting them up to the room in a bed-and-breakfast place in which I was staying, I relaxed a bit, reminding myself that there was no Gestapo, that few people would be interested in the contents of Gabrielle’s treasure.
I found a bank the next morning and rented a vault. I put the papers into it; the sacks would not fit. It seemed pointless to keep them, but I managed to fit them one inside the other and brought them back with me to my room. Later, I almost discarded them, realizing their inadequacy as totems. In the end I decided to keep them, because they were Gabrielle’s. Peeling a bit silly, I kept them for that reason, and I have them still.
Once my mission was completed at the bank, I thought of writing Gabrielle, of sending a telegram saying mission accomplished, but she had warned me: “No messages; no messages.” I was, as you must be reading this, certain that she would soon be dead, but she did not die then. The landlady, unable to rouse her, had called an ambulance and Gabrielle went to the hospital in an unconscious state from which she never really awakened. I had by this time cabled Eleanor, as I had promised, and the money came for a good nursing home.
I later visited Gabrielle there. They were kind enough to her, but she never knew where she was. I would sit, holding her hand, staying on in England days, then weeks, after my job required it, hoping she would speak. Sometimes, rarely, her hand moved, with the slightest pressure, in mine. But, finally, I came to terms with the fact that there was nothing further I could accomplish.
I never saw Gabrielle again. Eleanor came over to England to visit her just after I had gone back to the States. Later, Eleanor told me that the sisters at the nursing home had reported Gabrielle’s asking for Nellie, sometimes, even when she seemed asleep, calling out for Nellie. But when Nellie went to the nursing home, Gabrielle did not recognize her.
Gabrielle died some years later. I have continued to pay the rent on the vault in the London bank. I was able to return to my old job in the publishing firm; I was too good to let go, and women could be paid so little then, and given so much responsibility and so little recognition, that the publishers would have been foolish not to take me back.