Читать книгу Many Mansions - Isabel Bolton - Страница 6

ONE

It had snowed in the night, but the snow had been removed from the streets. It rained. The asphalt shone black and glistened in the rain, the tops of the taxis glistened, the umbrellas of the pedestrians and the rubber coat of the policeman at the corner of Twenty-eight Street gave off a bright metallic sheen. The air heavy with clouds and smoke and rain hung like a shroud over the city. In the tall office buildings clustered at the foot of Madison Avenue the lights shining in the assembled windows gave the effect of countless diminished suns and moons peering dead and rayless into the gloom and diffused an ominous light like the amber glow that fills the atmosphere before a summer storm.

A radio in the next room blared out the news, from the clouds above came the purr and drone of an airplane and from below the noises of the streets; motor cars grinding their brakes, tooting their horns; sirens, an ambulance, in the distance the louder siren screech of fire engines. In another room a telephone rang insistently. Wires under the pavements, cables under the seas, voices upon the air weaving the plots, weaving the calamities, thought Miss Sylvester, beating her breast in that dramatic way she had.

She was a small creature with delicate bones and transparent parchmentlike skin and her fragility lent her the appearance both of youthfulness and extreme old age. Her face under its crown of perfectly white hair was illumined and animated by cavernous dark eyes that seemed in the most striking manner to isolate her spirit from the visible decay of her body and in the play of her expression there was that immediacy of the countenance to respond to the movements of the heart which is always so noticeable in the faces of children.

Living so much alone she was in the habit of talking aloud—interrupting her thoughts—“My God, it cannot be! Preposterous. Impossible.” Old age was very obstreperous indeed and life perched up here in her sky parlor amid these congregations of lighted windows, looking into all these offices, watching people sitting at desks, at telephones, dictating letters, plowing through the most monotonous tasks, was bleak enough in all conscience and with this welter of imponderable event flowing through her mind, “Good God,” she frequently asked herself, “Who am I? What am I? And what’s the meaning of it all, these people—all this business conducted high in air—listening to these hotel radios, these telephones and this roar coming up from the streets as though escaped from the infernal circles?” After all, she was human; she had her human needs. Caged up like this!

But now the protest and revolt that had lighted her face went suddenly blank and was replaced by gentle, reminiscent expressions, for she had had an extraordinarily beautiful experience in the night—the nights of the old were stranger than strange. She had waked from a dreadful dream, sobbing, still, it seemed to her, violently shaking her grandmother and when she had subdued the sobs there she’d lain trying to orient herself. She had touched, or imagined that she had done so, the edge of the bureau, her hand had knocked, or she’d thought she’d knocked it against the wall; the wall retreated while the doors and the single window of her room were replaced by other windows, other walls and doors, and she had had the most bewildering sense of knowing and at the same time not having the slightest idea where she was, listening to many voices while large vistas—lawns and trees and meadows and blue skies and oceans—opened up to her and people appeared and disappeared in all the various rooms through which she searched. Gradually she made out that she was in her own small bed which she had been sure was on the left of the window now restored to its proper position. Left was left and right was right. And there she was correctly located in space while a clock struck twelve. She’d counted the strokes and crossed a threshold. For it was, she’d remembered, her birthday, the first of February 1950, and if she could believe such a thing she was now eighty-four years old. Highly awake to the inordinate strangeness of it all she’d crossed her hands upon her breast aware that gratitude was streaming from her heart. Gratitude, she might very well demand, for what? Just for this—being alive, feeling the breath plunging up and down beneath her hands—her life, this river on which she had been launched, still warm, still continuing to flow. She knew quite well that her hold on it was most precarious—she frequently prayed to be severed from it altogether, and moreover, she realized that life was not likely to offer her change or variety, here she was cooped up in her small room in this treeless iron city. Nonetheless she had her memories. The Kingdom of Heaven was within her. For after all what kind of a heaven could anyone conceive without these images of earth—these days and winds and weathers? Estimated by human events she would not have said that her life had been particularly fortunate. There had been plenty of catastrophe. She had had to bear for many years an intolerable secret which she would carry with her to the grave. However, what did these personal tragedies matter when measured up against a moment like this—fully conscious of carrying in her heart the burden and the mystery, filled with awe and wonder and rejoicing in that warm shaft of living breath plunging up and down beneath her hands?

Her condition had been a free gift. She had done nothing to induce it. There she had lain consumed with wonder, awe and reverence. What a comfort it had been to feel warm and without pain. The room must have been at just the proper temperature. The blankets felt so soft, the mattress so extremely comfortable. It had been a pleasure to luxuriate in flesh and bones that were not for the moment racked with pain.

The life of the aged was a constant maneuvering to appease and assuage the poor decrepit body. Why, most of the time she was nothing more than a nurse attending to its every need. As for the greater part of the nights one’s position was positively disreputable—all alone and clothed in ugly withering flesh—fully conscious of the ugliness, the ignominy—having to wait upon oneself with such menial devotion—Here now, if you think you’ve got to get up mind you don’t fall, put on the slippers, don’t trip on the rug. There now, apply the lotions carefully, they’ll ease the pain; that’s it, rub them in thoroughly. Now get back to bed before you’re chilled. Here, take the shawl, wrap it round your shoulders. Turn on the electric heater. It won’t be long before you’re off to sleep. Try not to fret and for heaven’s sake don’t indulge in self-pity. This is the portion of the old—having to lie here filled with cramps and rheums and agues—so aged and ugly with your teeth in water in the tumbler by your bed and your white hair streaming on the pillow and the old mind filled with scattered thoughts and memories, flying here, flying there, like bats in a cracked old belfry—haunted by fears, visited by macabre dreams.

Dear me, dear me, she thought, looking through the gloom into the lighted offices, if she could meet death upon her own terms how often she would choose to die. How beautiful to have floated away upon that tide of reverence. It was one’s ignorance of just how and where death might come to take one off that made it hard to contemplate. There were all the grisly speculations.

Would she have a stroke followed by a helpless dotage? Would she die of some grave heart condition long drawn out? She might be run over any day by a taxi or a truck. She might slip on the sidewalk and break a leg or a femur. She could hear the clanging bells, the siren of the ambulance that gave her right of way, bearing her off amid the city traffic to the nearest hospital. She could see the doctors and the nurses going through their paces—everything efficient, ordered, utterly inhuman—all the nightmare apparatus attendant on keeping the breath of life in her another day—who knew? Maybe another week; maybe a month or two longer—the oxygen ranks and the transfusions, the injections—penicillin and the sulfa drugs—Heaven knew what! And would there be sufficient funds she wondered to pay for all this nonsense—keeping the breath of life in one old woman more than prepared to give up the fight? Expenses mounted to the skies. Nurses were worth their weight in gold. And as for private rooms in hospitals! All these extravagances. Dear me, dear me. Could she imagine herself in an Old Ladies Home—in a hospital ward?

She worried woefully about her finances. Eating into her principal like a rat eating into the cheese, the only capital that remained to her those few government bonds. However, she’d figured it all out very carefully. She could live to be ninety—selling out a bond when necessary and keeping something for emergencies. Was it possible that she’d live to be ninety?

Not likely at all; most improbable!

And if she did, she’d have to take the consequences. She had always been a fool with money. She knew nothing about the care of it. When she thought about the foolish things she’d done—the naive way she’d listened to all those charming philanthropic young men who knew so well how to advise the single and unguided! It made her sick at heart. But the one decision she had made—capricious, unadvised—to settle on that unborn child a gift of seventy thousand dollars she wasted not a moment’s time regretting. After the completion of those arrangements if she’d had any sense she should have put her money into an annuity. They were, she supposed, fool proof. She was glad, however, she hadn’t done so (she did some swift and inaccurate sums in arithmetic). She wouldn’t be very much better off than she was now, and not a cent to leave to anyone. Those bonds, that balance at the bank could be bequeathed.

What a great lift, for instance, it would give to Adam Stone—how surprised he’d be, how grateful if she were to die tomorrow, to find himself heir to all she had! Poor Adam, she thought, poor Adam! And why not? Wasn’t he after all the only person in her life today for whom she felt genuine concern? What if she had picked him up in a restaurant? What if she had known him only a few years? Why not?

He was in his peculiar way as much of a solitary as she was herself—an odd, unhappy, interesting young man. He seemed to stand for her as a kind of terrifying symbol, seeing behind him many similar youths who had played their part in the great war and had returned without zest or hope or faith in life. And why would it not be so—marked and marred as they had been with the impact of the dreadful years? When she talked with Adam she seemed to feel the presence of a crowd of witnesses, all the young in every corner of the world. Against his bitterness, his utter disrespect for life, what was there she could say? She imagined that in his queer way he rather liked to feed upon his bitterness. You could not disagree with him; he resented argument. He would not brook contradiction. There was something rather superb about his anger—working it all out as far as she could see in a kind of sullen passion for art, music, literature. Books he devoured ravenously. He was, she gathered from his conversation, at work upon a novel. He had cast off his family. He had cast off one girl after another, or very likely one girl after another had cast him off. There was something hard, passionate and scrupulously scientific about the way he went in for these brief affairs of love—a short interval of violent passion followed by a tremendous battle of the egos—bitter, sensual, with neither romance nor beauty, but nonetheless rewarding because of some necessity he seemed to feel to further document his vast accumulating dossier on sex, all without doubt to go into the novel he was, if not at present, some day bound to write. He seemed to be driven from one sterile episode into another.

Poor boy, she thought, poor Adam. Was she justified she wondered—“A young man you met in an Armenian restaurant,” she said leaving the window and going to her desk where examining her check book and still continuing to talk aloud she muttered, “yes yes, taking that twenty-five thousand dollars that still remains to me in government bonds and adding my deposit, let me see, let me see, $3,497 and some odd cents, there would be in all (she added up the two figures) exactly $28,497.26.”

A tidy little sum. She supposed the proper people to think about were the poor old women of her acquaintance scratching along on almost nothing. She knew a number of them—there were several right here in this hotel, unutterably dreary, desolate and brave. How wonderful for one of them to wake up some fine morning and find herself heir to twenty-eight thousand four hundred and ninety-seven dollars and twenty-six cents.

But the rub was of course how much of this would still remain when she was dead. The uncertain residue—she had practically made up her mind to it in the early hours of the morning—should go to Adam Stone. The weather prevented her from going, as she had resolved to go this very day, to Maiden Lane to see old Breckenridge.

But then there were other things that she could do and as she was thinking so seriously of also bequeathing him her precious manuscript, she really should before she determined to do so sit down quietly and read it from beginning to end. What a strange thing it was she thought as she went into the bathroom to attend to the preparation of breakfast, finishing it, laying it away, never able to reread it. And why did she feel so urged to leave it in the hands of this peculiar difficult young man? What was it that consumed her—this hunger in her heart? And was not the most astonishing experience just this—old age? When all was weariness and pain and effort, when the chief business of every day was waiting on her body like a patient old nurse waiting on an unwilling absentminded child, to feel this fierce preoccupation! Was it because she had wanted to call in her conscience—her soul, her memory, as you might call in a priest at the last moment to offer absolution, that she had undertaken the writing of this book?

Well, well now at any rate she must put her mind on breakfast—this smuggling in, hiding away, pretending you didn’t make a kitchen out of your bathroom and a refrigerator out of your window ledge was a technique she’d mastered to perfection, she thought, stooping to fish a saucepan and an electric plate from under the bathtub, filling the former with water and attaching the cord of the latter—putting the water on to boil, opening the window to bring in butter, cream, fruit. She flattered herself she pulled it all off pretty well. It wasn’t that she didn’t grasp as eagerly as a child whatever pleasures life still offered her, there was something even a little sly about her manner of enjoying her small gratuitous blessings, as though she’d stolen a toy from the attentive nurse who kept watch over her or cake and candy from the august angel into whose hands old Nanny might at any moment deliver her. She made it her business to make as much out of her days as her frail margin of health allowed, lunching or dining at a restaurant and, what with the sandwiches, the yogurt, all the queer food that you could find in little tins, managing somehow to sustain herself. There was something a bit miraculous about her little feats and arrangements.

It took fortitude she admitted. The old deserved to be commended for their gallantry. Goodness, when she thought of the necessary chores—putting clothes upon their backs, food into their mouths, getting on and off the busses and across the roaring streets. Courage, self-assertion, vanity were all required. As for herself how ridiculously vain she was—always shaking off the kind and attentive people ready to assist her, as though to say, “Thank you very much indeed, I’m quite capable of looking after myself,” still trying to look as though her appearance suggested youth and vitality, never able to forget that she’d been, and not so very long ago, an agreeable and attractive woman. She was capable, she acknowledged it, of the most absurd behavior—little coquetries, high and mighty airs.

But maybe she could be forgiven for believing that she had in her eighty-odd years of life accumulated a little sagacity. She had her insights and divinations. Did she not carry all the seasons in her breast? All the ages of man were hers; and if she liked to watch the great human comedy with an impersonal yet highly sensitive and inquisitive eye, that was certainly her prerogative. If she was always skipping out of her own skin into the skin of somebody else was it not her way of editing her own experience to which she’d gained at her age a perfect right? Innocent and innocuous she might appear as she sat eating her lunch or her dinner and generally engaged in saying to herself—“Oh, yes, my dear lady, my dear gentleman, you may not be aware of it, but I know practically everything there is to know about you.” It wasn’t that she gave herself up entirely to staring. She enjoyed her food enormously. Her luncheon or her dinner out was the great event around which she planned her entire day. But she hoped and prayed she would never resemble the positively ghoulish old ladies she often observed addressing their plates as though the only passion that still remained to them was the appeasing of their hunger. How their table manners, their bright and greedy eyes betrayed them! She ate, she hoped, with restraint and circumspection. If she sometimes allowed herself a cocktail or a small bottle of wine it was with the belief that it sharpened her perceptions. She liked to lay herself open to every breeze of insight and divination.

The old were in it as well as the young! Plenty of old ladies. They got about in the most gallant fashion—joined up in the macabre procession; birds of a peculiar feather. One saw them everywhere with their permanent waves, their little hats set on their heads at such rakish and ridiculous angles, their coats and shoes and handbags following the prevailing fashion, tottering in and out of shops and restaurants. How avid and excited they appeared as though they wished to let you know they had their own important engagements to meet like anybody else. Life seemed to jostle and push the poor old things around; pretty exposed they somehow were. The family offered them no shelter or asylum. If they had sons or daughters or great-nephews or grandchildren they did not share their homes and even if they had been invited to do so would the independent old things have accepted such an invitation? Where were they housed? How did they manage it all? The restaurants were full of them. What with the vitamins and the excitement, the movies, and the radio, the prevailing atmosphere of carnival and cocktail bar, the buffeting and the exposure didn’t seem to kill them off.

It was, she remembered, under the influence of a dry martini—sipping it alone in the Armenian place on Fourth Avenue that she had picked up poor Adam Stone. There he’d sat buried in his book, his sullen, rather beautiful face looking extremely self-conscious. And why not? For he was, she had discovered, perusing Dante’s Inferno. What a pity, she had thought, that she was not young and charming, for she could read Italian too and this might have been one of those daydreams in which she guessed the young man beguiled his lonely condition come delightfully to life. “I see you’re reading Dante,” she had said; and when he’d taken in the situation—her ancient face together with the dry martini—he’d been quite naturally as rude as possible. However, she’d persisted. She had her ways with young men; she was not without intelligence. They had entered into conversation. Every time they had met they had continued to converse. And now, although he would not for the world admit this was the case, she helped very substantially in mitigating the solitude that overtook him in his all too frequent girl-less intervals.

Poor Adam, she reflected, examining her tray to make sure the breakfast she had now prepared was properly assembled; she’d not seen him for several months—he’d as likely as not found himself another girl and more than probably moved to a new address.

It occurred to her as she carried the tray into the bedroom, seating herself at the desk, that she would not be able to tell Mr. Breckenridge where to get in touch with him in the event of her demise. To think of making a young man her heir whose address she did not even know. Dear me, dear me, the anonymity of people’s lives.

Anonymous was the word for everyone—anonymous. Why, the precious self was shattered, blown to bits a thousand times a day and it was actually the case that there was something of insolence, a kind of effrontery about it if anyone presumed to have an assured assertive self—opinions, a personality of one’s own. It was incumbent on us all to do so many turns and tricks in adapting to thoughts, ideas, events, that if one showed oneself incapable of this agility of heart and mind there was a very real danger of lapsing into indifference, lack of sympathy, imagination, as though the poor battered soul were ready to lie down and say I’m beaten, numbed, dead, finished. Listening to all the assorted information, the nerves supplied with the new, the necessary antennae, the soul destroyed by the vibrations; why, the wholesale, the unprecedented calamities of the world cried out to us, shouted aloud every minute of the day. Yet who among us could endure to listen?

It was too much, too much for anyone she said, thinking as she spoke of her poor Adam. Poor boy, he held out against it all so stubbornly. He was without any knowledge of love; he did not, it seemed to her, understand the meaning of pity. He simply held out against letting it get him down. Such wholesale calamity diminished, dwarfed his little private griefs—the personal grievances and tragedies to which she guessed he clung tenaciously. It was for this reason she imagined he was so obsessed with sex. Out of his curious affairs he got but little joy, unless you could account the strife, the bitter conflict of two egos in their uneasy and anonymous roles attempting to assert their own authority, a kind of cruel self-inflicted pleasure.

Yes, Adam clung to his dwarfed uneasy self. You might say it had burrowed down in him, gone underground and as a witness of this there was that novel she was so sure that he was writing—a queer backhanded method of reasserting, reestablishing his dignity, authority. Goodness, think of all the lonely anonymous men and women there were today attempting to do the same thing; why, the novels came off the presses as fast as leaves in autumn falling from the trees and a novel was no matter what its subject matter as authentic a way of telling the tale of self as any that could be thought out.

Hadn’t she, an old old woman sat down and tried for seven whole years to thrust into novelistic form the story of her life? And why, she’d like to ask herself had she when it was finished locked it up in that desk drawer and never had the nerve to look at it again? And why now did she have this strong desire to place it in the hands of Adam Stone? Vanity was certainly involved. Adam would have to revise many of his notions about her. She’d have to admit that the idea amused her. Moreover he would, she imagined, discover that it had literary merit. She somehow felt it had. He’d take it in all probability to a publisher and after she was gone it would doubtless see the light of day.

But beyond all this there was a deeper reason. Didn’t she long to convey to him more intimately than she’d been able to in conversation something that she had realized in their talks together he’d not only held out against but found completely phony—her capacity for reverence, wonder, of which there was in his own constitution not a trace.

Not a trace, she said, rising with some difficulty to her feet. And was it not about to be extinguished in the human heart? Consternation, though few people would be able to recognize that this was so, standing out as we all somehow did against it, had usurped its place.

We simply stood aghast, she thought, crossing the room to get the morning paper which she must read before settling down with her manuscript (yes she was now firmly resolved to read it from beginning to end). “An excellent day for such a resolution,” she said, opening the door, taking in the Times and returning with it to her desk.

Pouring herself a second cup of coffee she sat down and spread the paper on her lap. The headlines sprang at her—the nightmare world in which we lived—all these chimerical events through which we passed. “Impossible, impossible,” she cried—“it staggers the imagination.” But here in large black letters was the announcement—Truman Orders Hydrogen Bomb Built—a fact at the disposal of everyone capable of reading. Within a few hours it would be lodged in the hearts and minds of most of the inhabitants of earth—hundreds of millions of people would quail before it as she was quailing now.

But who could really comprehend the cryptic data at the core of it? The words were Greek to her as they would be to all but a meager handful of her fellow mortals—concepts of the mind, mathematical measurements, calculations of inconceivable complexity. They affected her in some odd way as though she were reading poetry; the syllables fell so sonorously upon the ear.

“Molecules composed of two deuterons and a proton.

Two tritons, a deuteron and a proton,

A triton and a proton and a proton and a deuteron.

In one of these six possible combinations—

Triton—triton, triton—deuteron, triton—proton,

Or a possible combination of these three

Lies the secret of the triton bomb.”

You’d have to possess the brain of Einstein to understand it.

But here it was—the perfidious, the majestic secret explained if you could get it, and the words dancing with such terrible agility in her mind and heart.

“The triton bomb

is the last step

In a six-step process

One taking more

Than six million years.”

Could it be possible? Could it be humanly possible that the diligent, the honorable search for truth, the inquiry into the secrets of nature and the structure of the Universe would be closed and consummated with this annihilating explanation?

“The protons are hooked on,

one by one,

To an atom of carbon

Two of the protons

Losing the positive electron

And are thus transmuted

Into an electron—

As has been seen

A nucleus of one proton

And two deuterons

Is a proton nucleus

This is by far

The most powerful reaction

In nature

And takes place

In the sun

At the rate

Of four pounds an hour

A reaction time

That brings it within

The range of possibility.”

The paper dropped from her hands. She threw back her head and closed her eyes. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him or the son of man that Thou visitest him,” she cried aloud.