… the Glaenzers’ Effie …

WO EYES STARED BACK AT EFFIE from the other side of the shop window. The eyes, black, close-set above a Semitic nose and suave delicate mustache, traveled questioningly from Effie’s face to brown oxfords labeled “Snappy” in the case, up again to Effie, and down to green antelope pumps named “Chic,” hopefully back to Effie and over to silver sandals named “Classy,” all three reflected in a mirrored floor edged with green velvet and carelessly studded with silver stars. The eyes, persistently persuading, roused Effie’s numb senses. How long she had stood there staring at shoes she never saw she could not guess. She must have walked endlessly after leaving the hospital for she seemed to be somewhere in the Sixties and under the El Third or Second. With the black eyes still challenging her, she pulled her coat together resolutely and crossed the street, hurrying close beside a big man in gray coat, paper bag in his hand. She was afraid to be alone, and the big man did not mind her scuttling along beside him, he pulled her back so roughly before an oncoming truck that her arm hurt. “Thank you,” she murmured. In a little while the mist in her head would clear, she would remember where she was going, why, and this year, this moment would drive out the too vivid past. She would remember Marian. Yet Marian would not shape in her mind as the sick woman in the hospital but the Marian of old, and with that girl came the rest. Already the familiar dreadful figures assumed possession of her brain, the cast of the endless comedy were on the stage ready again for her aching memory to feed them their lines. But for that last hour or two of blessed amnesia Effie thanked the gods.

The dismal blue lamp of a corner coffee shop reminded her that she had scarcely eaten in the two days with Marian. She had slept on a cot in Marian’s room. “I’m so afraid alone—really,” Marian had pleaded with the nurse. As if Effie, too, now that they had presented each other each with her half of the magic ring, did not feel the same desperate fear of breaking apart again. What was that rule of the sea when a ship was rammed—keep the prow plunged in the split vessel, withdrawing brings on the wreck.… Keep the hurt close to you, then, stay with it, live with it, till all else is lost in this immediate urgency, mind and heart numbed.… The doctor had commanded her to go for the night. Go where? Step from the past into the bewilderment of the present, collect the bits that made up Effie Thorne of this year to present to the world, to Lexington Avenue, to the big man in the gray suit with the bag of oranges, present this assembled figure to the world of no-Andy? No-Andy. But Andy was coming back, coming back, leaving beautiful young Swedish girls for Marian, the only woman he ever loved. Drinking coffee and crumbling up a slice of dry pound cake into its cellophane wrapper at the lunch counter, Effie was alarmed to see her face in the mirror between the glistening percolator and the giant green ginger-ale bottle. Her felt hat was tilted back from her worn face and tears tracked aimlessly down her powdered cheeks as if someone inside her were weeping, weeping, though all she was conscious of herself was her aching spine, as if each tiny bone was a hot little ball, a little cranberry, she thought, exactly that, a hard little cranberry.

Supposing Andy did come back as Marian was so sure.… Dim shots of jealousy after all these quiet years frightened Effie; it frightened her to find a vengeful sardonic hope that Andy would fail Marian now as he had failed Effie before. Let Marian find out what heartbreak really was—after that her pain would be welcome! Desperately Effie captured and annihilated this rebel wish. Poor Marian, poor Marian, she repeated, poor, poor Marian, she could never stand what I did.

She paid her check and walked westward. She would call on the Glaenzers. If Andy was to return the Glaenzers would know, he would be certain to go straight to them. Moreover she wanted to be with them, she longed for the gloomy security of the dark old house as she had longed for it years ago only because Andy so often graced it and here were those who remembered. Here were people who could say, “Yes, it was true he did court you here, he did pursue you, he did love you, we saw him, we saw it all.” Entering the old cage of thoughts the present was sloughed off as a mere inanimate shell protecting the living organism that was the past. Andy about to return, not for her, no, but for her rival, but nevertheless Andy, Andy, Andy, rose and swelled before her as the one reality till it lost all proportion like a heroic statue viewed too closely. Vainly trying to hold his image constant it kept changing before her eyes like a Coney Island mirror—wide, thin, long, squat—all she could recognize was the shaking in her knees over his mere presence in the room. In these long years his picture had dissolved into all the strangers she had mistaken for him, a man glimpsed briefly at a Pullman window, a waiter, janitor, actor, a little boy in Prospect Park on a tricycle, all the people she had glanced at twice because something about them reminded her of Andy. So she had lost his image in her anxiety to preserve it, and the defection of her mind so angered her that sometimes in her dreams she had shed real tears. Real tears when she had learned long ago that there was no one on earth who could afford to weep, no occasion worthy of it; or if there was, what reason, then, once begun for ever stopping?

She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock. If she could only find Belle alone, for Tony’s faintly sarcastic manner would be too much for her tonight. Sometimes she could ignore it, his half-smile looking at her, see, it said, see what happens to women who lock their bedrooms against me, who push me away from their arms, see, their lovers leave them, they grow old and poor, they pay for spurning me in their brief youth. See, happy lover, his smile said, you come back to us for comfort, we enemies alone remain to you.…

Belle’s dignified brownstone house resolutely pushed its way out of the shadow of penthouse apartments on either side, just as her respectable old limousine raised its body a few haughty inches above the gutter instead of slithering along, daschund style, like the newer models of the penthouse tenants. A high iron grilling separated this decent-person’s dwelling from the unworthy passers by. There was something about the solid mahogany door, good lace curtains drawn taut over the narrow windows at each side, brass knobs scrupulously glistening, that made the occasional women callers wipe off their lipstick, pull down their skirts a little more.

Effie paused at the gate, bracing herself to be casual. The Effie of the Glaenzers today was the same Effie as of old, naïve, shy, blushing, target for sarcasm, apologetic, inferior to all in wit, beauty, or intelligence, as ready to be astounded at any Callingham’s protestations of admiration as to be abused by Belle’s caustic recrimination. Outside, as the former wife of Mr. Callingham, as Mrs. Callingham, woman of the world, Garden Apartments, West Twenty-second Street, it was different. Outside the iron-grilled gate on East Seventy-first Street she had grown, become a figure in a small Bohemian world, living quietly but always admired by a few sensitive young men, earnest artistic fellows as a rule who talked breathlessly of Andrew. The absent Andrew was the focus of this modest salon, though when Dennis Orphen appeared in her life this little group had fallen quietly away. Effie wondered about it a little, for the little circle of admirers had been something. But then Dennis was enough; egotistical, violent, loyal, he brought her the best of the active world like a papa robin bringing home the cream of the bait. Dennis was enough. Changed under his influence as she knew herself to be, gayer, happier, more integrated, her Glaenzer self still remained the same, uncertain, shy, girlish.

She found herself tonight mechanically adjusting her hat as though this futile gesture was a fairy wand transforming her from a harassed shaken woman into the nice untouched youth demanded by the Glaenzers.

“I’ll have to tell her about Marian being here and Andy coming over and I mustn’t be shaky about it,” she thought. “I ought not to let them see me this way but I’ve got to talk to somebody.”

Somebody—but not Dennis. Not after the book. There must be more of a front for Dennis than even for the Glaenzers. A front for Everybody, the enemy. A special public face decorated with a smile, a special manner. Trying out a smile tentatively, she saw a man slip beside her through the iron gate. It was Dennis, and in the sudden pleasure at seeing him she almost forgot for the moment that he was Enemy.

“I looked everywhere for you,” he said, quite angrily. “You’ve got no business worrying me this way. I’ve got work to do, damn it, I can’t be chasing around morgues and police stations hunting for you. It’s too childish running away like this, never telling me, never even a note! How was I to know you’d be coming up here to the Glaenzers’? I just took a chance, and as soon as I got here I wondered what I’d say—where’s Effie? and they’d say who the hell are you and what’s it to you?”

His battered hat was set sidewise, Napoleonically, on his tousled sandy hair, his tie was over his shoulder somewhere, his vest was buttoned up wrong, his eyes furious, and he smelled strongly of Scotch.

“I was worried.” His bombast collapsed quite simply. “What happened? I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t imagine what happened.”

“Do you want it for a new book?” Effie asked wearily. Exhausted herself, his tired hysterics did not move her.

Dennis was crushed.

“I got feelings,” he said. “I’m a writer but I still can feel. Don’t run off again, please. Let me stay with you here—I can’t stand thinking of you alone and upset. I was afraid it was the book that started it and it was too much on my conscience.”

He followed her up the steps and in the dark vestibule caught her arm urgently.

“All right, come in with me,” Effie said, beaten.

She rang the bell. Now her Dennis world and her Glaenzer world would merge and for her hereafter there would be no refuge in one from the other. Her two little spheres would combine against the two Effies to laugh, to study her pretensions; the Glaenzers would smile at the proud Effie Dennis knew, and Dennis would despise the hesitant apologetic Effie of the Glaenzers. Between them they would leave her nothing. It seemed to her that in the last few days she was being steadily relentlessly stripped of all armor, all retreats were being cut off, no mystery was left her for pride’s sake, no person but would know her story and her poor excuse for living. Let her die, she begged, let her be the one instead of Marian. She was too tired to struggle for herself.

As for Dennis, his anger at his own weak-minded worry over her now expressed, he was relieved, but there ensued an embarrassed sensation of being caught unawares by an unexpected emotion, and now his vanity came back, he didn’t want to visit her damned Glaenzers if it was to them she turned in her hours of need instead of to him. Besides he knew them, knew them too well from his own story of them written without ever having seen them; he didn’t want to live over his own novel. So, reluctantly he entered the hall behind Effie, afraid that his description of the “Glasers” as he had named them would seem pale by contrast with the original. He had a nauseating sense of entering the looking glass, of dreaming true, and once inside the door of horrid magic to follow. Even the gnarled old dwarf butler he had plagiarized from Effie’s anecdotes, though only the other day leafing over the first printed copy he had complimented himself on inventing the character. He saw himself stepping into a living material world of his own mind’s creation; here was the dark tomblike hall he had described with the little round stained-glass window over the first stair landing. Through the open carved oak doors on the right he saw entwined bronze fauns upholding candelabra over the alabaster mantelpiece of the reception room, saw the blurred pouting face of an ancestor in oil on the wall, the formidable blue brocade sofa, the gloomy electric logs in the fireplace. This was all in Chapter Nine of his book, and a faint chill crept up Dennis’s spine that his literary shadow should have investigated so truly, or worse, that his so-called creative process was sheer Pelmanism, careful records of other people’s conversations. His eyes stole up to the niche at the head of the stairs, not daring to believe that here would be a terra-cotta madonna. He breathed a sigh of relief to see in place of his own guess a large hideous Chinese vase filled with gloomy lilies.

“Belle likes lilies,” Effie said. “The house always smells like this. Like a funeral.”

They followed the old dwarf upstairs.

The rich, the good, solid old rich, live in wretched style, reflected Dennis. These ponderous old mausoleums with jail windows, moldy walls, dark high hallways, heavy dark consoles or carved chairs crouching in every corner like rheumatic old watchdogs ready to pounce on intruders, heavy-padded floors, these houses were to haunt and not to dwell within or visit. Poor Tony Glaenzer, Dennis thought, poor bastard, he should have picked a jolly phony rich woman, a penthouse nouveau, a flashy marcasite oil heiress with a nice dash of bad blood; that would be a gay vulgar prostitution, but never this substantial, true-blue Bank of England type.

The upstairs hall was a large rectangle with two crystal wall clusters dimly illumining an enormous Venetian oil painting, framed with alarming solidity for eternity. Three dark mahogany doors were stonily closed to view but double doors opened at the far end and from here voices could be heard. In here the dwarf vanished, carpets so deep, the walls so silent that you could hear his old knees crack as he walked and his wheezy asthmatic breathing even when he was out of sight. Effie walked on in without heeding Dennis’s hesitation. He stood still in the hall with his eyes shut tight, fearful again that the voices he dimly heard in there would belong to the creatures whose story he had so cleverly told, not told, he corrected himself, but imagined, built up from nothing but the sticks of a few chance remarks, for now it seemed to him Effie’s anecdotes had been not the base of his novel but the merest springboard for his own original imagination. If here and there reality fitted fancy so much the finer fancy, the artist brain outguesses God. True, he granted grudgingly, once a story begins in the hidden cellars of the brain, a thousand little thievish atoms steal out automatically raiding friends’ confidences, woes, loves, desires, to build and furnish complete the edifice which the artist, erasing all other sources and signatures, canceling all debts, believes his own magnificent sorcery. Bewildering to find the structure laid brick by brick of simple facts filtered cunningly through sleep or memory. No magic here at all, alas, but a tale reflected again and again in a dozen mirrors, shadows, and gaps filled by conjectures, and even the prophetic gift operated by a secret statistical mechanism. So here was Dennis Orphen, entering Chapter Nine of a book by himself, disturbed by the growing conviction that his genius was no more wondrous than an old file. He shouldn’t have come in here, anyway, he thought, for there was in his novel no role for Dennis Orphen; he had no business following his heroine brazenly through her own secret story. Wells wouldn’t do such a thing. Proust wouldn’t have. No decent author would step brashly, boldly into his own book. He hesitated outside the drawing room door again, heard his name asthmatically creaked, and a distinctly rude, “Who? Who, Milton? Oh, hello, Effie.” No getting out now. He would throw salt over his left shoulder, murmur an incantation, before subjecting himself to further necromancy.